Cate Blanchett and Her Husband Didn’t Like Each Other at First

Cate Blanchett is nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as composer Lydia Tár in Todd Field's complex character study Tár—her eighth Oscar nod following Elizabeth, The Aviator, Notes on a Scandal, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I'm Not There, Blue Jasmine, and Carol. And cheering her on from the audience tonight will be her husband, Australian director Andrew Upton. Here's everything we know about the actress's longterm partner and their marriage.

The couple met through work

Upton is a well-regarded playwright and director, and garnered acclaim for his stage adaptations of theatrical masterpieces like Hedda Gabler, Cyrano de Bergerac, The Cherry Orchard, Uncle Vanya, and Don Juan for the Sydney Theater Company. Upton first met Blanchett while they were working on a Chekhov play together.

While Blanchett and Upton have been married for 26 years, and felt so sure of their relationship that they got engaged just three weeks into their relationship, they have not necessarily always been each other's biggest fans. In a 1999 interview, Blanchett revealed that they didn't actually like each other a great deal to begin with. "He thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant," she said. "And it just shows how wrong you can be. But once he kissed me, that was that."

They got engaged after less than a month

Despite an initially rocky start, the relationship then progressed remarkably swiftly: Upton proposed after just three and a half weeks of dating, Blanchett revealed in a 2015 interview. They married in 1997, and have four children together: Dashiell John Upton, Roman Robert Upton, Ignatius Martin Upton, and Edith Vivian Patricia Upton.

Upton produced one of Blanchett's best-known films

In addition to being an award-winning playwright, Upton also works in film: he and Blanchett formed their own production company, Dirty Films, and he served as executive producer on the 2015 romantic drama Carol, Todd Haynes' adaptation of the novel The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith, in which Blanchett played the titular character—a performance which earned the actress her seventh Academy Award nomination.

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