Nicole Kidman - The Biography | Biographies | Written by Bryony
PROLOGUE: WHO IS NICOLE KIDMAN?
'I'm someone who likes to put her cards on the table. I like to be able to talk to people about who I am, what I am, what I experience. I like to be very open and free about all parts of my life.'
When Nicole Kidman permits interviews, she is surprisingly accessible. She captures the public's imagination with her warm, down-to-earth nature. And that laugh - an all-encompassing guffaw which never fails to infect those present.
On the surface she's a beautiful woman in the prime of life with a slender figure, delicate features, porcelain complexion and volatile hair. She never hides behind her height, instead drawing on her nigh-on 6ft frame to devastating effect. But underneath, her amiable personality hides a complex woman of intelligence, independence, ambition, romance, joie de vivre.
'I think you have to live life to the full, otherwise you have nothing to draw on,' she said at twenty-two, poised on the brink of leaving behind everything she held dear for the great unknown. She has liberally applied this motto to every aspect of her being.
Nicole's unconventional upbringing undoubtedly forged her open-minded perspective on life. Her Australian parents were both liberal and unorthodox. Discipline and control came from her biochemist father, and independence and feminism from her mother. As a teenager, Nicole forfeited a crucial year of her blossoming career to nurse her mother through breast cancer.
Nicole's unconventional upbringing undoubtedly forged her open-minded perspective on life. Her Australian parents were both liberal and unorthodox. Discipline and control came from her biochemist father, and independence and feminism from her mother. As a teenager, Nicole forfeited a crucial year of her blossoming career to nurse her mother through breast cancer.
A restless traveller, she has visited much of the world. Aged just seventeen she backpacked around Europe with a Dutchman twice her age, whom she'd only known for a month.
Relationships are of vital importance to Nicole. Many potted biographies overlook the fact that she engaged in two major, high-profile love affairs prior to her ten-year marriage to Hollywood's most bankable heart-throb.
Nicole's heart ruled her head when she fell hopelessly in love with Tom Cruise. He left his wife: she left her boyfriend, beloved family and an established career to move halfway around the world to be with him. At the start of her reign as Mrs Tom Cruise, twenty-three-year-old Nicole was totally overshadowed by his status, but eventually her individuality and immense talent shone through.
Plagued by rumours of infertility, Nicole discovered a formidable maternal urge when she and Tom adopted a girl and a boy of differing races. Although forcing her children to conform to her nomadic lifestyle, she is a devoted mother and fiercely protective of her family.
Being a working mum only makes her more determined to prove her ability as an actress; as Vanity Fair aptly commented, 'She has pursued her career with the relentlessness of a heat-seeking missile.'
A professional artiste for the last two decades, Nicole started young. Precocious nativity appearances had nothing on her startling stage debut in Spring Awakening: at just fourteen, Nicole played a fifty-year-old woman begging for sex. Then, with ten films and television series under her belt, she tackled the award-winning transformation of Megan Goddard in Vietnam. Hooking up with Kennedy Miller Productions at nineteen provided her first major break - her immortal portrayal of thirty-something Rae Ingram in the ground-breaking thriller, Dead Calm.
Career then gave way to personal life for a while, but Nicole fought back. Appearing as the malicious Suzanne Stone in To Die For kick-started her comeback and from then on Nicole started to select her films because of the director rather than the script. She worked with Jane Campion in the highbrow The Portrait Of A Lady and Stanley Kubrick in the exploratory Eyes Wide Shut. Retreading the boards, she bared all in the provocative The Blue Room. Since then she has glided through the musical Moulin Rouge!, chilled audiences in the supernatural The Others, paid homage to Virginia Woolf in The Hours and been traumatised in the psychological drama Dogville. Although the Oscar remains elusive, Nicole has garnered her fair share of trophies including Golden Globes, Logies and AFI Awards.
The extensive and extreme research Nicole undertakes for all her roles is not common knowledge. She has worn heavy iron shackles, witnessed drug-free childbirth, watched trashy television for three days, addressed sexual jealousy within her marriage, studied several languages, ridden horses and swung on the trapeze in the name of her craft.
Indeed, pushing back the boundaries is Nicole's forte. Her love of adrenaline sports is unlimited: she has jumped out of planes, performed aerobatics, scaled volcanoes and swum in snake-infested seas … leading to at least four near-death experiences.
Despite having left school at sixteen without qualifications, the actress is no dunce. Her parents may have fought a losing battle in their attempts to send her to university, but Nicole has educated herself by voraciously reading the work of authors Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emily Dickinson, the Brontë sisters, Henry James and George Eliot. She also speaks Italian and Russian, and has recently applied for a helicopter licence. Her love of the performing arts extends to various singing forays, past and present, and she is also keen to write and direct.
Nicole's self-deprecating candour about 2001, her annus horribilis, has endeared her to the world. But that's not to say what happened hasn't affected her deeply. In her typically frank manner she looks to the future: 'I'm an actress and the show must go on.' Still, there's an air of mystery about Nicole Kidman that demands interpretation, inviting closer inspection of her incredible life.
'To be an actor you have to have a certain amount of madness in you. That's why, when people meet you and you seem very together, they are quite surprised - they don't see you behind the closed doors.'
Nicole Kidman - The Biography | Biographies | Written by Bryony