Queen Elizabeth and dal rice? The tall and blonde Australian actress with the piercing blue eyes who sits before you in her suite at the Taj is a far cry from the ruthless all-conquering monarch she plays in Elizabeth.

``Well, I was wearing a wig, I didn't have eyelashes and eyebrows and some of the costumes became more restrictive as the queen got older,'' laughs Blanchett.

It was a childhood friend, an Indian, who inculcated in her a love for Indian cuisine and it was Bandit Queen, Shekhar Kapur's calling card to Hollywood, that got the star of Oscar and Lucinda to do the film.

``It was Shekhar. The prospect of working with him,'' she says almost reverentially. Blanchett walked out of a screening of the director's Bandit Queen in Australia a few years ago.``I found it disturbing,'' she says. She covers her face with her left hand to show how she later watched it on video. ``It was a very very powerful film.''

Elizabeth was one of those cinematic levellers. Shekhar Kapur getting even with the British for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. Better still, Australian actress, Indian director, British film and cast, the Commonwealth of films.

``He seemed to have a very liberating view on a very important part of British history, but he wasn't giving a history lesson,'' she says, echoing what the director has oft said about a newly crowned Queen's quest to protect her crown and country. But though it got seven nominations, Elizabeth didn't sweep the Oscars as Gandhi did. ``Oh that. Why are people obsessed with awards? The film was recognised internationally,'' she says.

``It was intense, absorbing and challenging, I didn't have a life during the making of the film 18 months ago,'' she reveals. The actress with deep roots in Shakespearean stagein her native Austrlia got into the skin of the character by reading biographies of the queen, analysing her portraits and handwriting samples and spent time researching the costumes and social manners of 16th century England.

But for all that effort, Elizabeth has been rather anti-climatically stalled by the censor board. Blanchett, co-star Joseph Fiennes and Kapur were to originally attend the premiere of the film today. But that didn't happen since the film is due for review by an appelate tribunal later this month.

And though she veers clear of commenting on the film's censor trouble, something that Kapur has gone to town with, the anxiety in her voice shows. ``I hope the film gets released soon, there's no point in making a film and it sitting in a box,'' she says recalling the standing ovation the film got in screenings at the Venice film festival.

Having successfully dodged the burst of initial imperial Queen-type scripts that came her way in the wake of Elizabeth, Blanchett is setto leave cape and crown far behind.

In The Man Who Cried for which she begins shooting in Paris next month, she plays a Russian emigre in a opera in Nazi-occupied France. Then there's Sam Raimi's chilling The Gift set in South America where she plays a woman gifted with supernatural powers.