A golden touch

THERE are few more iconic figures in some circles than Queen Elizabeth I and Bob Dylan. One was England's famous Virgin Queen, who vigorously guarded her country's independence during the age of Shakespeare and the Spanish Armada; the other America's rumbly voiced bard. Nothing connects them in the popular imagination, but a pair of concurrently released films shows these figures struggling with their phantom alter egos, the mythic selves that live free-form in the culture.

In "Elizabeth: The Golden Age," the monarch determinedly sheds her intimate personal identity to become the white-faced theatrical mother of the nation; in "I'm Not Here," Dylan -- or at least one of the seven versions of Dylan in the film -- is seen in his new electric guitar phase, "an amphetamine dandy" as director Todd Haynes calls him, willfully refusing to submit to his admirers' need to deify his folk-hero persona.

The less likely link between the two is that both parts are played by Cate Blanchett, the 38-year-old Australian actress who, in a mad period of months, transformed from a corset-laden monarch terrified of intimacy to an androgynous male singer-poseur.

The latter performance has already won her the best actress award at the Venice Film Festival, where "I'm Not Here" premiered. Still, Blanchett admits that when Haynes first approached her about the part, "I just burst out laughing. I said, 'What are you talking about?' " But she liked his audacious nuttiness. "How can you not take that meeting?"

Blanchett is in L.A. at the end of an 18-month working jag, which includes not only "Elizabeth" and "I'm Not There" but also "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," a romance with Brad Pitt, and "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull," which she's finishing. Blanchett can't say much about that last role (though an indiscreet day player has said she plays an evil Russian), but she does reveal that "Steven [Spielberg] is very proud that I've had to butch up." No bodices or fancy-pants accents. "He was joking the other day, saying he was going to cast me in a film where I was always in a harness flying through the air with guns in both hands."

Blanchett was certainly looser and giddier than when we first met half a dozen years ago. On that occasion, she was polite but reserved, with her hair shorn to about an inch long all over her head, and a plum constructed suit that she wore as chic armor. She was an actress on the rise, having already stunned critics and audiences with her portrayal of the young Elizabeth in Shekhar Kapur's first film about the famed monarch, but she remained distinctly wary of media limelight.