Cate Blanchett: 'We had been planning to adopt for 14 years.'

Earlier this year, Cate Blanchett and her husband Andrew Upton quietly adopted a baby daughter from the US.

The little girl, Edith Vivian Patricia Upton, is the couple’s fourth child, joining Dashiell, 13, Roman, 10, and Ignatius, 6.

At the time, Blanchett, 46, and Upton, 49, released a brief statement: “The Upton family (Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton) have adopted a baby girl. No further details will be provided.”

In conversation with Tina Brown at the Women in the World India Summit in Delhi on Friday, Blanchett spoke for the first time about the decision to adopt a new baby after having three children.

Blanchett told journalist and editor Brown that she and Upton had been thinking about adopting a child for many years.

Watch Cate Blanchett and Tina Brown at the Women in the World Summit… Post continues after video.

Brown asked why, just as they were “out of the woods”, the couple would choose to take on another newborn.

“We actually began the conversation a very long time ago, after our first son was born and he’s about to turn 14, and then we just had two other children and it sort of dropped off the radar,” Blanchett said.

“But I felt we had space, enough emotional room in our hearts and we’re privileged enough to have the capacity to have another child, so it wasn’t about biology.”

Blanchett, as a mother of three boys, spoke about how the family unit was important in the raising of men.

“It’s so important how we raise our boys. And it’s so important not only about their maternal figures but also their father figures and how that unit functions. And so it’s important for that reason alone to eradicate violence against women,” she said.

However, she did say that the adoption wasn’t about adding a girl to the family, either.

“There wasn’t a desire to have a girl necessarily — gender of the children has never been particularly important to me, it’s more about their spirits — but it’s been a remarkable thing watching them welcome her and become a little troupe.”

At the end of Upton’s tenure as artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company at the end of December, a role he shared with Blanchett for the first five years of his eight-year term, the Upton-Blanchetts will relocate to the US.