Cate Blanchett pops over to Buck House to fix the DVD player

She has played Queen Elizabeth II's ancestor twice, but it did not stop a gaffe-prone Prince Philip from mistaking Cate Blanchett for a film technician. Asked by the Duke of Edinburgh at a Buckingham Palace function what she did for a living, the Oscar-winning actress answered that she was "in the film industry". Assuming she was a technician, the Duke launched into a description of what was wrong with his faulty DVD player. He said: "There's a cord sticking out of the back of the machine. Might you tell me where it goes?" a courtier confirmed. Blanchett politely pointed out that she was in fact an actress and not much of a technician. "The Prince seemed a bit nonplussed," added the courtier.

Blanchett has twice portrayed the Queen's historical namesake Elizabeth I on the big screen – first in Shekhar Kapur's 1998 film Elizabeth: the Virgin Queen, for which she was nominated for an Oscar, and now again in his follow-up, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, for which she is again up for best actress at next month's Oscars. (Blanchett is also nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for a role the Duke could be forgiven for not recognising her in - her gender-bending portrayal of Bob Dylan in I'm Not There.)

Prince Philip has a reputation for putting his foot in it while on official engagements and Blanchett is not the first Australian to fall foul of his idiosyncratic style of diplomacy. In 2002 he asked an Australian Aboriginal businessman, "Still throwing spears?"