Transcript by foxy (may/will be errors)

Nicole Kidman - AN APPRECIATION by RYAN GILBEY

WHEN SHE ARRIVED IN HOLLYWOOD, NICOLE KIDMAN WAS JUST MRS. TOM CRUISE. NOW - AFTER THE DIVORCE, THE OSCAR AND ALL THE RUMOURS, SHE'S ABOUT TO STAR AS A CLONED HOUSEWIFE IN 'THE STEPFORD WIVES'. SHE'S THE MOST POWERFUL ACTRESS IN THE INDUSTRY, AND SHE'S THE FACE OF CHANEL. SO JUST HOW DID SHE PULL IT OFF?

She has crisp blue eyes and painted lips full of promise. A secret joke plays in the corners of her mouth when she smiles. (It's a joke you'd like to be in on. ) Her fizzy red curls frame her flawless porcelain face, or sit piled and tethered at the back of her head. She has never been hotter, and yet there is a chill about her too - she's as thin and pointed as a stalactite. But then you don't need me to describe her to you. Chances are you know Nicole Kidman's face as well as you know your own.

After all, Entertainment Weekly magazine didn't anoint her "the most powerful actress in Hollywood" in 2003 because she's shy and retiring, or always in the kitchen at parties. This woman knows how to make herself liked. And that face will be everywhere for a while yet. Kidman recently signed her first advertising contract, with Chanel, for which she was paid around $5 million, including a $2 million fee for an advertisement by Baz Luhrmann, who directed her in Moulin Rouge (and who will do so again once his Alexander the Great film project finally gets off the ground).

Advance word indicates that Kidman appears in the ad as Marilyn Monroe, which sounds like a rare misjudgment on her part. The Monroe iconography felt jaded when Madonna wheeled it out back in the early Eighties for the 'Material Girl' video; if anything, Kidman seems beyond such celebrity-by-numbers. Regardless of whether she proves to have the cultural longevity of Monroe, her exquisite taste in film roles is what will ultimately insulate her against the slings and arrows of outrageous critics. It is more likely, given her eclectic choice of parts, that she will follow in the clip-clopping heels of Catherine Deneuve, another ice maiden who lent her face to Chanel.

The two actresses share an eye for a director who can stretch them. In her heyday, Deneuve put herself in the hands of Jacques Demy, Polanksi, Bunuel and Truffant, and in recent times she has lost none of her daring, signing up with the likes of Francois Ozon and Lars Von Trier. It may be that Kidman will beat her at her own game. She can already cross off her list Von Trier(Dogville), Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain), Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut). Jane Campion(The Portrait of a Lady) and Gus Van Sant (To Die For). One renowned director, who preferred not to be identified, told me that he invited her into the cutting room recently to help him solve an editing conundrum. She evidently knows her onions. Her passion for cinema is not only immense and genuine, it is completely at odds with the celebrity-driven culture of which she is the mascot du jour.

For proof of this, you had only to witness the bafflement and frustration of showbiz hacks at a recent press junket during which the actress rhapsodised about the films of Wong Kar Wai, the playful Chinese auteur with whom she is planning a future project. The air of resignation in the room came from everyone realising grimly she wasn't about to dish dirt on Lenny Kravitz, Jude Law, Tobey Maguire or any of the other few hundred actors and musicians with whom she was supposedly slow-dancing even as the ink on her divorce papers was still wet. This may be one of the chief reasons to cherish her. Where most stars in the 21st century want fame only for its own sake, Kidman seems to have grasped its authentic advantage; you can use it as leverage in the pursuit of your art.

Julia Roberts continues to demand a larger fee than Kidman ($20 million per film compared with $15 million). But can you imagine that Roberts views her career in the same way? She got an Oscar and a heap of praises for her slangy, slutty turn in Erin Brockovich, and the prize was well deserved, though it didn't take Roberts in a brave new direction. Her latest hit, Mona Lisa Smile, could have been made decades ago; it's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with Gucci, Mercedes - making a gag of the idea of the perfect mate as the definitive male lifestyle accessory. That was followed in February by the ultimate fortuitous plug: Marc Jacobs, everybody's favourite designer, unveiled a new collection marked out by slightly twee tweeds, mink trims, prim pink sweaters with bows. Jacobs cited painter John Currin and his anti-romantic portraits of American suburbanites as his inspiration, but the two words that invariably sprang to mind as his creations appeared on the catwalk were "Stepford" and "Wives".

The piquancy of casting Kidman is the cherry on the cake; as someone who spent the first part of her career clutching her husband's arm like a drowning woman clinging to a rubber ring, she may find some resonance in the film's story of enforced submission. Also in the offing is the lead in the big-screen take on Bewitched, and, reportedly, a role as an oversexed secretary in the glitzy movie of Mel Brooks' Broadway smash The Producers. Perhaps then she will find time to solve world hunger.

Meanwhile, she dropped out of Von Trier's Dogville sequel, Manderlay, ostensibly due to scheduling conflicts with Sydney Pollack's upcoming The Interpreter - but also, I would venture, because she hates to repeat herself. You can see this pattern in the films she isn't in, as much as the ones she is. It may have been an injury that forced her to pass on Panic Room, but she must have recognised too that the film's scenario (scared mother and child trapped in creepy house) was too close to that of one of her key movies, The Others (scared mother and children trapped in creepy house). And when she ducked out of In The Cut, protesting that she felt too vulnerable for the part, she might have wondered if she hadn't already explored the same territories of sexual aggression (in Eyes Wide Shut) and frailty masquerading as confidence (in Moulin Rouge).

If this gives the impression of a woman presiding over her career with the strategic precision of a general sending his troops into battle, that's no accident. Kidman has her ditsy side, cultivated in extra-curricular activities such as her number one duet with Robbie Williams, but she knows what she's doing. It was not always the case. Indeed, the haphazard nature of her early years is part of what has made her artistic recovery so miraculous. She's no Sharon Stone; Kidman has got it too good to ever return to the kind of cookie-cutter parts that cluttered the Nineties - winsome eye-candy (Far and Away, My Life, Practical Magic), harpy (Malice), or just the love interest (Days of Thunder, Batman Forever), dolled up to the nines and looking bored as hell. Although she had been splendidly brittle and sexy in films made in her native Australia - the riveting Dead Calm, or the sweet-as-candy comedy Flirting - her star power was dim enough for a major film encyclopedia to dismiss her in 1994 as merely a "willowy actress...married to Tom Cruise." SHe knew things were going wrong, and she put them right: she convinced the director Gus Van Sant to cast her as the scheming weathergirl in To Die For, in which she hared to make herself despicable.

The industry can handle any amount of prosthetic transformations: John Hurt in The Elephant Man, Charlize Theron in Monster, Kidman herself in The Hours. Give 'em a pound of rubber and they'll put you up for an Oscar. What Kidman did in To Die For was a riskier metamorphosis. At precisely the point at which conventional wisdom would have advised her to ingratiate herself with audiences, she did the opposite. She went against the grain, her eyes shooting daggers, her mouth spitting obscenities and vitriol. Her demonic dance in the headlights of a parked car is a display of chilling control every bit as disturbing as her taunting of Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut, or her quiet endorsement of genocide in Dogville. She wasn't going to win a place in your heart with To Die For. She could leave that nonsense to Sandra Bullock and Meg Ryan. Kidman was going to do something more pervasive and enticing than that: She was going to keep you guessing.

She hasn't stopped yet. There has been plenty of criticism about her part in Eyes Wide Shut - that it seemed curtailed, or that the movie fell flat once her brief screen-time was over. But these complaints miss the point that Kubrick must have cast Kidman because we would feel her absence once she wasn't there. Remember, this is a movie about frustration, in which sex is promised endlessly but never delivered. It was imperative that the actress in question should wrap the audience, as well as her on-screen lover, around her little finger. Her eyes were glazed with a cruel, knowing wisdom as she puffed on a joint and delivered her true confessions. She was playing herself beyond the reach of her clueless husband. Cruise is very good in this underrated film, and gamely puts himself up for ridicule. But in their few scenes together it became clear that theirs was an unequal marriage. She acted him off the screen.

The movies that followed broadly represented a comeback - or rather, a shift in the priorities of a woman who had previously been content with red carpets and popping flashbulbs. Cruise executive-produced the subtle ghost story The Others even as their 10 year marriage was coming apart, and external circumstances can only have fed into her heartbreaking, jittery portrayal of a woman struggling to gold onto a lie. She got an Oscar nomination for remaining human within the grotesque freakshow of Moulin Rouge, and put considerable donkeywork into the paper-thin role of a Russian con-woman in Birthday Girl. It's doubtful that any actress could have made that character work, just as no-one, least of all Kidman, should have grappled with the white-trash cliches of the promiscuous janitor in The Human Stain. It is no reflection on her that those films failed - they asked too much of her, just as Cold Mountain demanded too little.

But when the balance is right, no one else comes close to her. Look at Dogville, during which Kidman is on screen for three hours, enduring all manner of humiliation, as well as exacting her own revenge, all without once raising her voice. What other performers accomplish with a few pages of dialogue and a shrink-wrapped Oscar Moment, Kidman can do with a shrug, a sigh, and a downhearted glance. She is a character actor renting space in the body of an iconic superstar. The wonder is not in the friction between these two sides, but in the fact that they are co-existing happily.

It is perhaps a breed of chauvinism or misogyny that compels us to muse on how Kidman got where she is. We don't ask the same of her male counterparts in the Hollywood hierarchy; we don't ponder Jim Carrey's career strategy, or Tom Cruise's game plan. That might be because we have an inkling that there's nothing much going on there. But aren't we deeply suspicious of a woman who makes such assertive artistic decisions? We want to say: who let her into this club? What is her secret?

But like Deneuve, Kidman is a good game-player, a professional tease. She knows how to be all things to everybody without letting anyone feel they own her. She might play the giggly greenhorn on the chat show circuit, toying coyly with her bangs and biting her bottom lip in mock embarrassment, but that only make her performances all the more enigmatic. The disparity between the goofiness that she displayed with interviewed by Michael Parkinson or David Letterman, and the barricaded maturity of her work in The Hours or Dogville, is fascinating. It forces you to ask: who is she? As long as we keep mulling that question over, Kidman's mystique is unlikely to wane. END