In 1996 an Irish journalist named Veronica Guerin pushed the drug peddlers of Dublin a little too hard. She was shot dead in her car on a country road, and became a national hero. A troubling kind of hero, to be sure. She left behind her husband and small child, who had been endangered by her reckless prodding at powerful criminals. But she also shamed the country into cracking down on them. Seven years later, the elite of Dublin loudly applauded Australian actress Cate Blanchett's performance in the film Veronica Guerin. Not everybody liked the way the story was told. But they loved Cate Blanchett's flawless imitation of a Dublin accent. They loved the ferocity of the performance. "Imagine that," says producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who took time out from his customary bloated action films (Pearl Harbor, Top Gun, Beverley Hills Cop) to make a film about a woman who "should be remembered." "With Veronica's mom and dad and son in the audience, Cate got a ten minute ovation. For a young Australian girl to fool the Irish is really something." Only a powerful Hollywood producer could think of Blanchett, who has a razor-edged intellect and a prodigious talent, as a "young Australian girl" or imagine that her intent was to "fool the Irish."

Blanchett likes to seem insouciant about a career which has clearly been built on a brutal amount of hard work. "I have to be seduced back to acting every time, there are so many other things to do in life. I don't know whether I'll..." she says, and then hesitates, realizing that you don't really want to say "whether I'll stay in this job" in a profession where lots of backup goddesses would be happy to hip-bump you back to Melbourne. "I mean, I love what I do," she continues. "I've been seduced back many times." Jerry Bruckheimer, who thought she should have won an Oscar for Elizabeth instead of just being nominated, sent her the script for Veronica Guerin. Blanchett was curious right away about the character. Guerin, it seemed, was a woman who had lived her whole life in overdrive. When she pounded on the doors of psychopathic killers who didn't want to talk to her, she did it with exactly the same manic energy she brought to "playing football or flying to Nicaragua," says Blanchett. "She loved being at the centre of things. Fireball energy, that's what's behind the film." She doesn't need to add that there is a clear affinity of personalities between herself and Guerin, so far as being "enigmatic and passionate" is concerned. But when Blanchett looked more deeply into Guerin's story she was, like most people, increasingly troubled.