SUBMITTED BY Timbo

October 14, 2003 — Cate Blanchett plays a truly heroic real-life figure in her latest movie, someone whose guts and courage existed in real-life and didn't have to be conjured up by a screenwriter.

As the new movie "Veronica Guerin" shows, the journalist was about as heroic as a real person could get: an investigative reporter who continued to expose the doings of Irish gangsters after being threatened, viciously beaten and shot in the leg while standing at her own front door.

"I saw a '60 Minutes' special on her, after she was shot the first time," recalls Blanchett, 34. "Isn't that the great irony? It wasn't what she was writing, it was the fact that she was a female journalist who was shot in the leg that actually got her some attention. And I was fascinated not only by her -- I found her incredibly enigmatic and incredibly passionate -- but this was a pocket of recent Irish history I knew nothing about."

Guerin's coverage of Dublin's heroin trade and gangsters led to her murder.

After surviving a bullet in the thigh in 1995 and a beating from drug lord John Gilligan later that year, she was shot to death June 26, 1996. Two men on a motorcycle pulled up next to her at a traffic light on the outskirts of Dublin. The one riding pillion fired six rounds into her body. Guerin was 37. She left behind a husband, Graham Turley, and a 6-year-old son, Cathal. Three men were eventually convicted of her murder. Two of them later had their convictions overturned but remain in prison for other crimes.

For many Irish people, the assassination of Guerin -- who had become something of a national icon -- was as devastating as the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was for the English. Her death led to Ireland's largest criminal investigation, resulting in more than 150 arrests and a crackdown on organized-crime gangs. But what was she like?

"I tried to figure out the building blocks of the way she spoke, the way she moved," says Blanchett.

The actress studied Guerin closely in television and radio interviews. "For someone in a television interview, particularly someone who is not an actor, it's a very, very uncomfortable situation. The more she did, the more aspects of her personality could be revealed." In the end, Blanchett came to think of Guerin as "absolutely hilarious. She was a very buoyant personality, really."

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