Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman: The Actress Who Plays Concealment

In September 2024 the Venice Film Festival gave its Volpi Cup for Best Actress to a 57-year-old woman for playing a chief executive who dismantles her own life in an affair with an intern. She was not there to collect it; her mother had just died. The performance in *Babygirl* was the kind Kidman has been making for thirty years and which almost no one else attempts: a study of a composed woman watching her own composure fail, filmed in close-up, with nowhere to hide.

Hōkūlani, and the Refuge of the Stage

She was born Nicole Mary Kidman in Honolulu on 20 June 1967 — her parents gave her the Hawaiian name Hōkūlani, "heavenly star" — to Janelle, a nursing instructor and member of the Women's Electoral Lobby, and Antony Kidman, a biochemist and clinical psychologist. The family returned to Australia when she was three and settled in Longueville, a suburb of Sydney.

She trained at the Phillip Street Theatre, alongside Naomi Watts, and at the Australian Theatre for Young People, and has described acting as "a refuge." Fair-skinned and red-haired, she rehearsed indoors while other children were outside. She left high school without finishing to act full time. In 1984 her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and Kidman stopped working to study massage therapy so she could help with her physical therapy.

Dead Calm to Hollywood

She made her screen debut at sixteen in *Bush Christmas* (1983), won her first Australian Film Institute Award for the miniseries *Vietnam* (1987) and a second for *Emerald City* (1988). *Dead Calm* (1989), opposite Sam Neill, was the film that travelled; *Variety* credited her with giving the character "real tenacity and energy."

Hollywood followed within a year, and for most of the 1990s the work was uneven and the fame enormous. *Days of Thunder* (1990) introduced her to Tom Cruise, whom she married that Christmas Eve. *Billy Bathgate* brought a first Golden Globe nomination; Gus Van Sant's *To Die For* (1995) won her the Globe outright, with the *San Francisco Chronicle* noting she "brings to the role layers of meaning, intention and impulse." Then came *Batman Forever*, *The Portrait of a Lady*, David Hare's *The Blue Room* in London — which brought an Olivier nomination — and Kubrick's *Eyes Wide Shut*.

The Year Everything Changed

Her marriage ended in 2001. So did any doubt about what she could do. *Moulin Rouge!* brought a first Academy Award nomination and a second Golden Globe. *The Others*, released the same year, took over $210 million. And in 2002 she played Virginia Woolf in *The Hours*, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress — the first Australian ever to do so — along with a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and a shared Silver Bear. She used the Oscar podium, with the Iraq war beginning, to say simply that art is important.

Kidman has been direct about the sequence of cause and effect. The divorce, she said in 2015, "led me to focus... on my career. Out of my divorce came work that was applauded."

The Difficult Choices

What she did with the freedom is the most interesting part of the record. She went to Lars von Trier for *Dogville* (2003), a film shot on a chalk-outlined soundstage, in what *Rolling Stone* called "the most emotionally bruising performance of her career." She made *Birth*, *Fur*, *Margot at the Wedding*, *Rabbit Hole* — which she also produced, earning a fourth Oscar nomination as a grieving mother — and *The Paperboy*, which competed at Cannes. On stage in 2015 she played the crystallographer Rosalind Franklin in *Photograph 51* in the West End, winning an Evening Standard Theatre Award and a second Olivier nomination.

She has also cheerfully taken the paycheque: *Bewitched* earned her a Razzie, and *Aquaman* (2018) grossed over $1.1 billion.

Producer, and the Television Turn

She founded Blossom Films in 2010, and the second half of her career has been built on it. *Big Little Lies* (2017) won her the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress and a second Emmy as producer of the Outstanding Limited Series; *The Washington Post* wrote that "Kidman belongs in the pantheon of great actresses." *The Undoing* became HBO's most-watched show of 2020. *Being the Ricardos* (2021) — Lucille Ball, for Aaron Sorkin — brought a Golden Globe and a fifth Oscar nomination. *Nine Perfect Strangers*, *Expats*, *Lioness*, *The Perfect Couple*: she now generates her own work at industrial volume.

The Pledge

In 2017 she committed publicly to working with a female director every eighteen months. By February 2025 she had worked with nineteen in eight years. Halina Reijn, who directed *Babygirl*, said Kidman "practices what she preaches when it comes to feminism and empowering women." *Time* named her a Woman of the Year in 2025.

Why Nicole Is Called a Genius

Meryl Streep, presenting her the 49th AFI Life Achievement Award at the Dolby Theatre on 27 April 2024, praised her "formidable talent and stunning range of work." The AFI's own criterion is that the recipient's talent has "in a fundamental way advanced the film art." *The New York Times* ranked her the fifth-greatest screen actor of the twenty-first century in 2020.

The specific quality is best described by *The New Yorker*: "something waxen and watchful and self-possessed about Kidman... she can wear a mask and simultaneously let you feel what it's like to hide behind it." That double action — playing a person concealing herself while letting the audience see the concealment — is the hardest thing in screen acting, and it is Kidman's native register. It is a technical accomplishment rather than an intellectual one, and she describes it in technical terms: "I'm a character actor. I was trained as a character actor. I believe in changing the way you look, the way you move, the way you speak." She left school early; nothing about the claim rests on scholarship.

The honest counter-case is volume. Kidman works more than almost any actor of her stature, and the hit rate is correspondingly mixed — a Razzie for *Bewitched*, tepid receptions for *Grace of Monaco*, *Expats* and *The Perfect Couple*, and reviewers of *Lioness* complaining that a "frozen face" distracted from the performance. A skeptic can reasonably argue that she is a superb technician who is not always discriminating about where the technique goes, and that the reputation is carried by perhaps a dozen films out of eighty. The response is that the dozen exist at all, and that she keeps making the difficult ones when she does not have to.

Legacy

Made a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2006, an Oscar and two-time Emmy winner, the first Australian recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award, Kidman has spent four decades declining to settle into a persona. "I still approach acting," she has said after nearly forty years, "like I've just come out of drama school." The most useful thing she has built may be the production company that lets other people's difficult films get made.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actress — 2003
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy — 2001
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama — 2002
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Miniseries or Television Film — 2017
• BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role — 2002
• Worked as actor, singer and film producer