Ahead of her starring role in Steven Soderbergh’s thriller Black Bag, and as her London stage run in The Seagull continues, we look at the screen queen’s most commanding roles

Cate Blanchett played a pretty generic “wife” role in this interesting, somewhat forgotten US comedy about air traffic controllers from director Mike Newell, whose title is their slang for guiding planes. It was saddled with a terrible ending by its screenwriters, Glen and Les Charles (creators of TV’s Cheers), and blitzed at the box office by The Matrix. Its genesis is amusingly described by its producer, Art Linson, in his memoir What Just Happened? Blanchett plays the wife of hotshot young air traffic controller John Cusack, who has an affair with Angelina Jolie – who is married to Cusack’s workplace rival, Billy Bob Thornton.