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Nicole Kidman - Cruising to the Top

By Ivor Davis

"She started her acting career at 6 (paying a sheep in a Nativity Play) and never looked back. Today, Nicole Kidman is known as much for her performing prowess as for her etheral beauty or her marraige to Tom Cruise. And what pleases her? Being called a "character actor" by Eyes Wide Shut director Stanley Kubrick."

The year was 1989, and a young Nicole Kidman had just made a splash in Dead Calm, an Australian film about a terrifying kidnapping at sea. The critics raved. The Los Angeles Times called her a "magnificent discovery". Meanwhile she was assuring the Australian media. "I'll take it easy on publicity for a while. It's all to do with overexposure." Just weeks later, Tom Cruise, one of the highest grossing movie stars in the world, asked to meet her and hired her to play his love interest in the car-racing potboiler Days of Thunder. By December 1990, in a quiet ceremony in Telluride, Colorado, Nicole had become Mrs. Tom Cruise, giving her more exposure than any young actress vying for stardom in the U.S. Practically overnight, the young Australian was living like a megastar.

By 1992, when Kidman and Cruise finished Far and Away, their second film together, they were featured side by side on enormous billboards: same size picture, same billing. The perception in Hollywood was she had come too far too fast. As for Nicole, she was undergoing a full-blown identity crisis.

"I wasn't Nicole Kidman anymore," she recalls. "I was referred to as Mrs. Tom Cruise. For the first three or four years, my personality was defind in relation to his. I married a great actor, and he's a huge movie star," she explained. "I haven't earned any of this."

Subsequently, her constant effort - some would say obsession - has been to prove she's not some conniving foreigner who hitched her wagon to a star as a shortcut to stardom. Her work in this past year has gone a long way in helping her get that point across.

Last fall, she arrived on the London stage in David Hare's controversial play The Blue Room, playing five different women whose ages ranged from teenagers to 40-somethings and who were involved in a variety of romantic and sexual relationships. Though a brief nude scene no doubt contributed to the media frenzy surrounding the play, Kidman's performance took her career to a new level. The notoriously savage London critics, prepared to attack the work of someone they imagined was just a Hollywood "bimbo," found themselves fighting each other for superlatives to praise Kidman's performance. When she took the play to Broadway, the New York critics followed suit.

And now there's the serious buzz over her latest film, Stanley Kubrick's long-in-the-making Eyes Wide Shut. Director Kubrick died in March, just as the film was finished, but early word is that with this performance, Nicole, despite co-starring with her husband, may have put the Mrs. Tom Cruise label to bed for good.

Those who know her best never doubted it would happen. What Ms. Kidman wants, she usually gets. "My mom calls me tenacious," she laughs, "I think my determination has been there since I was a little kid."

She was born in Hawaii on June 20, 1967, where her father, Antony, a biochemist and psychologist who wrote popular self-help bookos, was studying. The nightly dinner table was the site of animated political discussions. Janelle Kidman was an ardent feminist and often shepherded Nicole to the local feminist organisation in Australia to help hand out pamphlets.

Nicole got the acting bug at age 6 when as a sheep (dressed in car-seat covers) she upstaged the baby Jesus in the school's nativity play. She attended drama school right through her teens, winning heavyweight parts in plays like Sweet Bird of Youth and The Seagull. But the young girl, who at 22 would be photographed by Lord Lichfield as one of the ten most beautiful women in the world, considered herself ugly at school. Surrounded by sun-kissed, blond, blue-eyed Australian beach belles, she was pale, skinny, and 5'10". Finding dance partners was always a challenge.

But her ambition never waned. At 14, still in drama school, she decided she needed an agent. "I went through the phone book and called every agent in Sydney until one agreed to represent me," she recalls.

At 18, she was cast in an Australian film, Flirting. Set in a girl's school, Nicole played the conniving, manipulative leader of the pack: with a face and figure like a fragile butterfly, she was pure steel. Two strong landmark Australian mini-series followed: Bangkok Hilton, about drug smuggling in Southeast Asia; and Vietnam, which chronicled the story of the Australian forces in that conflict. Soon everybody in Australia knew there was a new contender for the successor to their only international female movie star, Judy Davis.

But it was 1989's Dead Calm that got her on Hollywood's radar screen. As Sam Neill's terrorized young wife, she blew everyone away, not least of them Tom Cruise, who after hiring her to play opposite him in Days of Thunder fell in love and proposed. Her friends were shocked that she planned to marry at 23, but Kidman had travelled extensively for her career, and argued that she felt more like 35.

Nicole, like Tom, was raised a Catholic. Unlike him, she had found that faith sustaining. Cruise, who had once contemplated the priesthood, was now a devout Scientologist who credited much of his amazing success to the movement.

Though she rarely discusses the subject, Nicole once told an Australian journalist, "I wouldn't classify myself as a Scientologist, but my husband is. I am who I am, and I don't credit anybody except my parents with helping me."

Concerned that her career would be inextricably linked to Tom's, she went solo, racking up an impressive list of credits and leading men: She polished her American accent to star opposite Dustin Hoffman and Bruce Willis in Billy Bathgate (1991). Robert Benton, the film's director, called her "one of the most amazing actresses I have ever worked with." Producer Robert Colesberry said of the budding star, "She's always in control, and it surprises me that she's only 23. She has the maturity of an actress who has been in the business for many years."

She made Malice with Alex Baldwin, My Life with Michael Keaton, a Batman sequel with Val Kilmer, and gave a terrific dark, comic performance in To Die For as an ambitious TV weather girl, Suzanne Stone Maretto, who would do anything, sacrifice anyone, to get to the top. The part had been offered first to Meg Ryan and Patricia Arquette, but Nicole had lobbied hard for it. "I was destined to play this," she told director Gus Van Sant. "I know this woman."

She won a Golden Globe for the role, but some people had trouble figuring out where Nicole ended and Suzanne began. Vanity Fair ran a story that depicted her as a relentless go-getter. Nicole chalked up the backbiting to gender discrimination. Tom's determination is called intensity," she said. "My determination is called ambitious to the point of ruthlessness."

The Portrait of a Lady (1996), the film version of the Henry James classic, in which she portrays an idealistic young American woman out of her depth among Europe's decadent aristocracy, was the role that was supposed to turn the focus back onto her acting. Portrait's director, New Zealander Jane Campion (The Piano), had first spotted Nicole on her drama-school stage at 14 and sent her a postcard saying she hoped to work with her one day. Nevertheless, for this role she put Nicole on an emotional torture rack before accepting her for the part.

"Jane had serious questions about whether I could do it," Nicole admitted. "The role was a passion, but I didn't want to make the film unless the director believed in me."

The result was a heavywieght performance, although the film was not a commercial success, and Nicole was overlooked at Oscar-nomination time.

Follow-up roles in the action thriller The Peacemaker (1997) opposite George Clooney and Practical Magic (1998) with Sandra Bullock didn't meet the high standards she set for herself. So she returned to the stage in The Blue Room, the perfect play to make everyone sit up and take notice. "Films are frustrating, " she told the Evening Standard. "In plays there are all these great meaty roles. Why would I choose to do a mediocre film role when I could do something like this? And be in London." From now on, she says, she plans to play only interesting, complex women.

Her frustration with films made the decision to accept the role in Eyes Wide Shut an easy one, despite having to work with the notoriously difficult and demanding Kubrick. Kidman and Cruise have been careful not to give away too much about the psychosexual thriller, in which Tom and Nicole allegedly play married pyschologists. But a short clip with some pretty racy nudity (from both stars) garnered worldwide attention when it was shown to the media before the film opened.

For the couple, this is the big gamble. They spent 16 months on the film - going back and forth to London over a two-year period to satisfy the demanding director. Early in the shoot, Nicole returned to the U.S. to do publicity on Portrait of A Lady and declared: "People say Stanley's controlling, makes all the decisions, and doesn't allow you any freedom. It's not true. He's very open, perceptive, and extraordinary. However, when you work with Stanley, you live the way he wants you to live."

It was Kubrick, she says, who gave her a new career direction. He called her a character actor. While that label certainly couldn't be attached to Tom, it made Nicole happy because it implied depth and seriousness. Her desire to tackle these kinds of roles sustained her through the long months of shooting in London, though it meant the Cruises spent little time in their comfortable homes in California, Colorado, and Sydney, Australia. But Nicole had no qualms about devoting so much time to the genius director.

"Could we have done three other movies [during that time] and made lots of money? Who cares?" she says. "This was an epoch in our lives. I will forever remember it for being this strange, wonderful experience."

The Cruises' marraige appears to be thriving, and they work hard at it and at being actively involved parents to their two adopted children, Isabella Jane, not 6, and Connor Anthony, 4.

Eyes Wide Shut aside, they try to make sure they are not both working at the same time. If they can't avoid working apart, they see each other every two weeks, even if it means flying from one side of the world to the other for a weekend together.

"A relationship requires constant creating, constant work," Nicole explains. "But I'm willing to do it, and he's willing to do it. So that makes me think we're going to last. I had no doubt from the minute I got married that it was going to be my only marraige." Not competitive on the film front, they are fiercely so in their intense pursuit of physical danger, with Nicole determined to match Tom's thrill for adventure.

"I'm an adrenaline addict,: she admitted a few years ago. "I love danger. It's who I am. When I'm 80, I don't want to regret having missed out." However, her sky diving, scuba diving, race-car driving antics have been toned down since the arrival of the children and an incident on a vacation trip to southern Italy in 1996 while hiking up the Stromboli volcano. Overtaken by darkness, with an inexperienced guide and none of the proper equipment, she had to be rescued in the early hours of the morning. It made her reevalaute her responsibilities. And despite her career ambitions, she makes it clear that her kids take precedence over the job, whatever it is.

"Acting is my passion, but I'd definitely give it up for my family," she says. "I get so much joy from my children."

But her drive is just not as fierce as it was. "I still want to work, but now I want to live my life more than I want to win. "Next up for Nicole is the movie Birthday Girl. She adopts a Russian accent to play a mailorder bride who is brought from Russia to London by a young financier (Ben Chaplin) who discovers he got more than he bargained for. The modestly budgeted $7.5 million film is due to be shot in England and Australia this summer.

And Nicole plans to go right on taking risks, pushing her boundaries. She and her friend Jane Campion are working on a film version of In the Cut, from the erotic novel by Susanna Moore about the sex lives of women. Nicole will produce and star. It's dangerous stuff, full of frank, even kinky, sex and violence, just the kind of thing, in fact, that could get her excited about movies again. +

Ivor Davis writes an entertainment column for the New York Times syndicate.