As a playwright, Upton created adaptations of Hedda Gabler, The Cherry Orchard, Cyrano de Bergerac, Don Juan, Uncle Vanya, The Maids, Children of the Sun and Platonov for the Sydney Theatre Company and Maxim Gorky's The Philistines for London's Royal National Theatre. His original play Riflemind, with Hugo Weaving as an ageing rock star planning a comeback tour, opened at the STC on 5 October 2007 to favourable reviews. Riflemind opened in London in 2008, directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman but closed after a short run due to uniformly poor notices and the pressure of the Global Financial Crisis. In 2008, Upton and wife Cate Blanchett became joint artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company for what became a five-year term. Upton and Blanchett formed a film production company, Dirty Films, whose projects include the short filmBangers and the feature filmLittle Fish. Upton wrote, produced, and directed Bangers, which starred Blanchett. He was the associate producer on Little Fish, which also starred Blanchett. In 2006, he wrote the film Gone which was directed by Ringan Ledwidge. Upton wrote the libretto to Alan John's opera Through the Looking Glass which premiered with the Victorian Opera in Melbourne in May 2008. In June, 2014, Upton was recognised with the Rotary Professional Excellence Award, an award instituted "to honour a person who has demonstrated consistent professional excellence in his or her chosen vocation by contributing to the benefit of the wider community beyond their typical workplace role".
Personal life
Upton and Cate Blanchett met in 1996 on the set of a TV show, and were married on 29 December 1997. They have four children: biological sons Dashiell John, Roman Robert, Ignatius Martin, and adopted daughter Edith Vivian Patricia, whose adoption was confirmed on 6 March 2015. They lived in Hunters Hill, New South Wales in Australia for several years. Following the sale of their property there in late 2015, Upton and Blanchett purchased in early 2016 a historic $6.25 million English manor, Highwell House, in East Sussex, England. Variety has reported that around the same time the couple also purchased a modern-minded five-bedroom duplex apartment in downtown Sydney once owned by satirist Barry Humphries, and purchased from The Celebrity Apprentice Australia host Mark Bouris for an amount "somewhere in the neighborhood of $8 million".
