Cate Blanchett as Annie Wilson, whose psychic powers draw her deeper and deeper into the undercurrents of the small Georgia town where she lives.
the gift

It was all new for Cate Blanchett, and that’s saying something. After all, the Australian-born actress has recently tackled everything from British royalty (she picked up both an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe Award for her portrayal of the title role in the 1999 film, Elizabeth) to a bored American heiress on the loose in Europe (in last year’s The Talented Mr Ripley).

In The Gift, Cate Blanchett plays a woman with psychic powers. But, as Eleanor Singer reports, her ‘gift’ is almost as much of a curse as it is a blessing, drawing her into a situation which becomes increasingly dangerous for her and her children.

But The Gift was something else altogether. Directed by Sam Raimi from a script co-written by another Oscar-winner, Billy Bob Thornton (who reportedly based Blanchett’s character on his own mother), the film required her to play a widow with psychic powers living in a small town in the Deep South. And Blanchett is someone who doesn’t even read horoscopes.

Greg Kinnear as high school principal Wayne Collins and his unfaithful fiancée, Jessica (Katie Holmes)

“I’m the sort of person who doesn’t want to know what’s going to happen in the future,” she admits, “so I had never actually been to a psychic or had my cards or palm read. I had to bite the bullet and go to a lot of different psychics and mediums, and that was really an amazing experience. Most of the ones I spoke to said that their ability is a gift they want to give back, because with the gift comes enormous responsibility.”

Jessica as she appears to Annie after her murder

That, certainly, is the experience of her character in The Gift. Annie Wilson is a recently widowed single mother living with three small children in a small southern town. Not only is she blessed - or cursed - with the ability to look into the future: she also carries a lot of unresolved feelings about the death of her husband which, as a psychic, she ought to have foreseen and might even have been able to prevent.