Scans by foxy. Initially some parts were scanned by The Meems but all now rescanned. Thanks to The Meems for your contribution. Transcript by foxy - may/will have errors.

The views expressed in this article are not those of this site. In particular, some of the film evaluations are a moot point. And the mention of Nicole's so-called date, although expressed as rumours, can in fact be negated - the only one of truth was Lenny Kravitz - and Nicole does not date married men which is why she has sued in some instances, and won.

Of interest in the article are the many quotations from the directors she has worked with.

WORDS JAMES MEDD
PHOTOGRAPHY : JAMES WHITE

How NICOLE KIDMAN conquered the world.

or
How Nicole Kidman Rose Above The Disadvantages of Breathtaking Beauty & Incredible Talent To Become The Most Powerful Actress In The World.

When, in October 2003, 'Entertainment Weekly' named Nicole Kidman "the most powerful actress in Hollywood", it should have come as no surprise. The awards were piling up - Baftas, Golden Globes, an Oscar for The Hours, even a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame - and she was about to appear in three of her most ambitious roles to date. At the end of 2003, she would play the consummate romantic heroine in Anthony Minghella's rich and satisfying Cold Mountain, then, in January 2004, a psychologically scarred refugee from the world in Robert Benton's film of Philip Roth's The Human Stain. As if that wasn't enough, in February there would be Lars Von Trier's allegory Dogville in which she suffers torture, humiliation and rape, not to mention the Danish director's trademark in-your-face digital-video camerawork. Epic, literary, experimental: was there nothing this woman couldn't do? Of course she's the most powerful actress in Hollywood.

But Kidman's conquering of Hollywood was still a surprise. Five years before she had been widely considered to be a mere trophy wife to the world's biggest star; when the marriage ended, many expected her career to go the same way. The sheer weight of quality films she made since 2000 would have been impossible to predict. As Anthony Minghella tells Esquire, "The early part of her career didn't suggest where she was going to end up, or where she's arrived: as somebody who's really developing from movie to movie."

Finally, it was a surprise because of the manner in which she had achieved it. Kidman was not a box-office superstar - of her headline roles, the relatively unsung The Others had taken the most, and that was $97 million (compare the same year's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone figures of $317m in the US alone). Her pay has just reached $15m, while Julia Roberts has been on $20m since 2000. Kidman has reached her position without starring in a single crowd-pleasing romantic comedy; her roles have all been films of daring, substance and meaning. Says Minghella, "Somebody was saying to me that, by rights, she shouldn't have had any of the success she's had in the last few years because she's gone off and done the most quirky projects. Going off to work in Spain with a young film-maker [Alejandro Amenabar, The Others], going off to work with Lars Von Trier, even playing Virginia Woolf in what was seen as a very small and supporting role in The Hours; those are not choices that at the time would have made much sense to an agent or a manger or an industry."

So how did she do it? Here's how, in five chapters.

1.
'Dead Calm'
(1989)
In which we meet our heroine

Kidman was 21 when she made Dead Calm, her first international film. (She started young, attending acting classes in her native Sydney at the age of 12, and had already appeared in kid's movie BMX Bandits at 13 and TV mini-series Vietnam at 18.) It's a fine thriller, and she gives a capable performance, but really it was her screen presence that caught the attention: the pale, sharp-boned face, the red curls, the deep blue eyes, the air of untouchability. It certainly caught Tom Cruise's attention: one shared filmset (1990's Days of Thunder) later and, by Christmas 1990, they were married.

Whatever the nature of the marriage - and at times it seemed everyone had a theory - it did two things. First, it left her stick with the untouchable ice-maiden image. Not a natural smiler, she seemed to do so even less as Mrs Cruise; shyness and myopia, she said, but it can't have been helped by the banks of cameras and having to go up against the Cruise all-American grin. Secondly, it elevated her to the levels of Hollywood royalty - though not to A-list status as an actress.

2.
'To Die For'
(1995)
In which she shows us what she's made of

She might have been slipping from the public consciousness at this point, but she hadn't finished yet. She fought for the lead in black comedy To Die For, telling director Gus Van Sant - who had not even considered her - that she was "destined" to play the part of ruthlessly shallow smalltown beauty Suzanne Stone Maretto. "I read the scripts and I just went, 'Ah, it would be so great to actually get to work on something that requires you to work, that requires thought and requires research and requires more than just showing up and looking good.'" she explained.

She was right to fight; her performance, which seemed to consciously subvert her goody-goody image, suggested that there was rather more there than we had supposed. Unfortunately her next three films - the Liaisons Dangereuses-type Portrait of a Lady, the nuclear-war tomfoolery of The Peacemaker and the Thelma and Louise-meets-Bewitched twaddle of Practical Magic - were all disappointments, and memories can be short. It was "Goodbye Nicole, hello again Tomandnic".

3.
'Eyes Wide Shut'
(1999)
In which she undergoes a great transformation

Stanley Kubrick's final film and a final effort to unite Tom and Nicole, much-hyped, long-drawn-out sex drama Eyes Wide Shut was surprisingly vacuous, and focused far more on Cruise's character than on hers. All the same, for Anthony Minghella, the 18 months spent working intensely with Kubrick was the making of her. "I think it was probably an incredible film school for her," he says. "She got very close to him, I know, and I'm sure there was, irrespective of what you might think of the movie, some release in that process for her."

Kidman said as much herself: "It resonated through our lives and marriage. Stanley breaks you down. He challenged all of the concrete, solid bases that I'd set around myself and made me far more introspective." For Lars Von Trier, meanwhile, it was the reason he cast her in Dogville. "Nicole had expressed a wish to work with me," he tells Esquire. "After seeing her in Eyes Wide Shut I was not in doubt she had a wonderful charisma. I wrote the part [of Grace in Dogville] for her."

Soon after finishing Eyes Wide Shut in September 1998, Kidman went on stage at London's Donmar Warehouse in David Hare's The Blue Room. THe 10 seconds of nudity involved may have been the highlight for The Daily Mail, but it was her performance that stood out for other - Stephen Daldry, later to direct her in The Hours, for one, as he tells Esquire: "I always believed, and mostly for me it came through The Blue Room, [that] she had extraordinary range as an actress, and maybe that range hadn't been explored yet."

4.
'Moulin Rouge!'
(2001)
In which she is reborn

The story goes that Baz Luhrmann enticed Kidman into the role of tragic courtesan Satine in Moulin Rouge! with a bunch of roses sent backstage at the Donmar Warehouse. The note attached read: "She sings, she dances, she dies. How can you refuse?" True or not, it's a story that certainly suits the decor of this love-it-hate-it campfest.

Though any reasonable person is going to have problems with a musical that employs Elton John's "Your Song" as one of its main romantic motifs, Kidman's performance in this colossally over-the-top production is hard to criticise. She was beautiful, naturally, but she was also warm, funny, camp and passionate. She looked like she was having fun. In short, she was human and likeable - loveable, even - for the first time in her career.

This was vital. As Sydney Pollack, who is soon to direct her in The Interpreter, said: "I think in the beginning Hollywood was put off by her coolness. They like their hearts to bleed for a character. When she plays an unflattering character, like in To Die For, she doesn't protect herself the way a lot of actors will. She doesn't wink at the audience or try to redeem herself unconsciously. That takes a lot of guts."

The end of her marriage was announced in February 2001. Cruise turned to Penelope Cruz and, if you believed the papers, Kidman was soon turning to almost every man in the US (just a random sample from the past few years: Russell Crowe, Tobey Maguire, Ewan McGregor, Ben Affleck, Iain Glen, Jude Law, Lenny Kravitz - not all of whom she has sued over). Naturally, this made her infinitely more appealing than she had been as the wife of a superstar Scientologist action man.

She was now an all-singing, all-dancing showbiz angel combining the best bits of Kylie, Katherine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. A Number One single with Robbie Williams, duetting on "Something Stupid", further enhanced the good-time image (why else would she do it, after all?). And she topped it all with a fine display of Aussie spunk on The David Letterman Show: "Well, I can wear heels now."

5.
'The Hours'
(2002)
In which there is no stopping her

Moulin Rouge! had a massive effect, but Kidman still had some way to go. "The point at which we chose her for the role [in The Hours], she was not the Nicole Kidman she is now," says Stephen Daldry with a wheezing chuckle. "In the billing, it goes Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore then Nicole Kidman. That says everything."

Before her divorce, she had made two films, both of which came out in 2001, the same year as Moulin Rouge!. Anthony Minghella watched both and was amazed by what he saw. One, Birthday Girl, in which she played a Russian conwoman, he calls "hugely underrated"; in The Others, "I saw how amazing the performance was - astonishing, really - and I realised that I hadn't properly given Nicole credit for what she was doing in her career at that point. I realised that this was an actress absolutely at the top of her game."

In the only part she took in 2001, Kidman was utterly convincing and (admittedly, with the help of that infamous prosthetic nose) utterly unrecognizable: that of the fierce, desperate, tortured Virginia Woolf. By all accounts, she went deep into the character - even going to the lengths of learning to write right- handed. Kidman's complete absorption in her roles lies somewhere between The Method and the faintly deranged - other examples include taking up smoking for The Human Stain and learning Russian for The Birthday Girl. As David Hare, writer of The Blue Room and adaptor of The Hours, has said, "I dread that someone will hire her to play an Arctic explorer, and then we'll lose her in the Arctic forever."

Minghella tells how "she talked the other day about 'surrender': she surrenders to a role and surrenders to a film-maker." Daldry is quite sure this fills an emotional need in her. "Because of her divorce," he says of her performance in The Hours, "two things happened at the same time: a huge amount of emotional vulnerability, combined with a huge need to work. So work became her primary means of self-definition, as opposed to her marriage."

With this level of commitment, it's little wonder Kidman is the director's favourite. And then there's her talent: "She's a transforming actress," comments Daldry, "which is unusual. You don't get the same performance in every movie. She can actually transform herself, and that puts her in the league of the greats." Her range - "extraordinary", Robert Benton calls it. And her intelligence: "That's one of the things that people cast her for," Minghella comments. "Because she can convince you that she might be Virginia Woolf, it doesn't feel like an intellectual stretch."

As Harvey Weinstein, co-chairman of Miramax, the company behind both The Human Stain and Cold Mountain, has said: "Most actors and directors want to work with her because they know she'll help them raise their own game." And the feeling's mutual - she signed up for both Von Trier's Dogville and Pollack's The Interpreter without seeing the script. "She's known for being attracted primarily to directors, and she works incredibly well with them," says Daldry. "In that sense she is much less like a so-called Hollywood star and much more like a proper grown up actress.

KIDMAN WON HER FIRST OSCAR FOR 'THE HOURS', having been nominated and missed out for Moulin Rouge!. Her status was set. But it's hard to see how long she can keep it up: there is an air of mania about her at the moment. Stories of her intensity - trying to back out of roles, staying in character for days on end - are already rife; those questioned all put this down to perfectionism. But some are concerned about her workrate. Daldry, when asked what he would most like to see her do, answers, "Go to the beach." Von Trier wants her to "Slow down!" Minghella reports having only been able to get her for a coffee at their last meeting. Perhaps she just feels that now is her time. She has said in the past, "The God's honest truth is, as a woman, you don't have an enormous career ahead of you. You have a certain time when it's very, very productive and then it's impossible to get work."

She is certainly choosing carefully, anyway. Among the films she has turned down recently are Mr and Mrs Smith and Catwoman, both of them picked up by Oscar winners (Angelina Jolie and Halle Berry respectively). Due out later this year are Birth, a drama in which she falls in love with a 10-year-old boy, and a comedy version of Seventies sci-fi piece The Stepford Wives. Projects lined up, apart from Pollack's The Interpreter, include Baz Luhrmann's forthcoming Alexander the Great biopic. "It's all about , "Is this artistically worthy?" she has said. "Otherwise, I'd prefer being with my family." (And The Stepford Wives? "I needed to be irreverent, to breathe in a different way," apparently.)

From there, if not to the beach, then where? Robert Benton guesses "someplace that neither you nor I could predict". Lars Von Tried, asked the same question, is briefer still: "Away... I'm afraid." +