Cate Blanchett's fairy tale life

Cate Blanchett’s skin. Wowsers. Pure white marshmallow. Not a hint of fake puffery: I was worried she might have succumbed, like so many of her Hollywood contemporaries. It really is the finest skin I have ever seen, I say.

“Ha, ha, ha, haaa,” fuffles 39-year-old Cate, tucking her feet up on a chair in the Covent Garden hotel, London. I guess she is used to it. Here on a publicity junket for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, she will later be perfectly queenly with a group of Japanese journalists who agonisingly dissect, through a translator, the film’s CGI technology. (All she will say, gently, is that she doesn’t “really enjoy this bit”.)

The Cate machine has taken over most of this floor and the above, where her three boys, Dashiell, 7, Roman, 4, and Ignatius, eight months, are sleeping. “They’re in a big bed upstairs, and the baby’s in the bathroom,” she says