Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  Lawrence was not certain what to expect from her once filming began. “She was very open and easy to direct and work with, but already had confidence and good craft skills which made it easy to get good outcomes,” he explains. “She was a thorough professional from the word go.”

  The only scenes that gave her a hard time, he says, were those in which she had to ride a horse and wear long frocks and petticoats. “Like a lot of actors, she was quiet and serious about her work and because she was a little shy I was slightly concerned that she might baulk at the ‘kissing’ scene, but, as at all other times, she was proficiently ‘in the moment’ and so suddenly ‘bold’ that it threw Brett a bit, which was perfect for the scene. I had wondered about whether there was enough ‘justification’ for this little plot element, but by the time we finished the film we all wished we’d had more of Nicole in there—and the audiences loved her, of course.”

  Actually, it wasn’t the actors that gave Lawrence a difficult time during the filming. “Horses are especially flighty and sensitive, even with the best training,” he says. “And such thoroughbreds tire easily and get bored and have to be protected. Also, like all of us, they are better at some things than others.”

  Actually, there were three “Archers” in the film, he says—the main one and a couple of doubles that were used for different tasks such as running, jumping or crossing rivers. “One funny note is that the lead actor, Bret, was allergic to horses.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Nicole’s next movie was Wills & Burke, a comedy directed by Bob Weis. It must have been a real clunker because no one in Australia today will discuss it and it cannot be purchased on videocassette in the United States. It has literally vanished from public sight. All actors have movies in their past that they would like to pretend never happened, and for Nicole that movie would appear to be Wills & Burke.

  As sometimes happens in the movie business, Nicole went from that experience to one that would radically change her life. She was signed for the lead role in the television miniseries Vietnam, a drama that recreated the passions that had so inflamed the country, including her own parents, in the 1960s and early 1970s. She was given the role of Megan, a young woman who sees her life profoundly affected by the war. Also co-starring in the series was Brett Climo, who had worked with Nicole in Archer’s Adventure, and Alyssa-Jane Cook, who went on to become one of Australia’s most respected actresses and television personalities.

  When the story begins, Megan is fourteen, an awkward schoolgirl who seems unaffected by the war, but, when it ends, she is twenty-four and very much involved in bringing the war to an end. For Nicole, playing the role was a challenge that required her, for the first time in her life, to do outside research on a character.

  “It really made a big difference to me to work with a three-dimensional character and flesh out the comic and dramatic aspects of the role,” Nicole told Cosmopolitan magazine. “I became obsessive about acting. I did all sorts of research about the mores and culture of the Sixties. I wasn’t even born yet when the Beatles became popular, so I had to sit down and study life in the Sixties, as if for a term paper.”

  The highlight of the series occurred when Megan, by then a vociferous opponent of conscription, was a guest on a radio call-in show. As she participated in the listener discussions about the war and the draft, a Vietnam veteran called in to express his opinions. Megan recognized the voice: It was her estranged brother, whom she had not seen or talked to in a long time. The point from which she recognizes the voice and then breaks down in tears lasts for six minutes.

  It was a masterful scene that required Nicole to express an array of emotions, using only her face; beautifully done, it was accomplished in one take and established Nicole as an actress to be reckoned with. When the miniseries aired, Australians reacted very emotionally to the scene and quickly elevated Nicole to star status. The Australian Film Institute responded by presenting her with an award—her first—for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Television Drama.”

  ~ ~ ~

  After the success of Vietnam, Nicole showed up for work in Perth for her next project overflowing with enthusiasm and optimism. Windrider, directed by veteran Australian cinematographer Vincent Monton, was a windsurfing movie directed toward the youth market. Nicole signed on to play the roll of Jade, a rock singer who falls for a wind surfer (Tom Burlinson) who works at his father’s engineering firm.

  Burlinson, who was thirty when filming began, was born in Toronto, Canada to British-born parents, who subsequently moved to New Jersey, then back to England, then on to Australia, where the parents divorced and Burlinson remained with his father. After doing television in his early twenties, he got his big break in 1981 when he was cast as Jim Craig in The Man From Snowy River, starring Kirk Douglas. He had made two additional movies by the time he signed on for Windrider, but, for some reason, his career had cooled considerably by then.

  Windrider begins with Nicole watching Burlinson do a 360-degree turn on a windsurfing board. There is almost no plot development in this movie and Nicole has very few good lines. Mostly, she stands around looking pretty, saying things like “What are you doing, mate?” She still has a deep Australian accent at this point in her career and she plays that up, sometimes looking like a caricature of an Aussie punk rocker on the make. She does no singing in the film, but she does lip-sync to the music.

  The most notable thing about this movie is that eighteen-year-old Nicole does her first nude scene, ever. It occurs with Burlison in a shower, where she is covered with soap lather. Subsequently, she does other nude scenes in which she displays her still-developing breasts (an A-cup would seem excessive coverage) and barely legal buttocks, clearly her best physical asset at that point in her life.

  Probably not until the movie was released did Nicole know she had made a mistake. Reviews were typical of the one written by Desmond Ryan for the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Windrider, an Australian production that proves that Hollywood has no monopoly on airhead entertainment, doesn’t have much more content than the average balloon . . . [it] would have done everyone a favor by forgetting its silly plot and following the wave created by The Endless Summer. In this case, facts would make a stronger movie than fiction.”

  Nicole’s judgment in making the film may have been impaired after shooting began because she began dating her co-star, Tom Burlinson. It was the first big romance of her life and lasted for nearly three years. She was enthusiastic about the romance and transferred that enthusiasm to a film that was not worthy of her passion.

  Windrider ended up becoming a turning point in Burlinson’s career. He made only four feature films after that, and although he worked in several Australian television series, he put less emphasis on acting as the years went by (he has not made a movie in over ten years) to focus on his singing career. He has a singing voice that is remarkably similar to that of Frank Sinatra—he was chosen to be the voice of the “young” Sinatra in the American miniseries produced by Tina Sinatra—and he has made a nice living in Australia in the early 2000s with a stage show he created, “The Sinatra Story in Song.”

  ~ ~ ~

  In an 1989 interview with Rolling Stone, Nicole was philosophical about both Burlinson and the movie: “I accepted roles when I was younger, which I don’t regret, because on everything I’ve done I’ve learnt something or I’ve met someone who’s been quite instrumental in molding my career. On Windrider, I met someone that . . . was really important to me and helped me to grow. So you’ve got to look at things positively. I did do some thing that weren’t of really high quality, but I learnt a lot.”

  The relationship with Burlinson ended in 1988 when he asked her to marry him and she said no. Shortly after her breakup with Burlinson, she began dating actor Marcus Graham. Four years older than Nicole, the Perth-born actor had made only one film at that point, Dangerous Game, but he would go on to make numerous movies, including 2001’s Mulholland Dr. and 2002’s Horseplay. For Nicole,
the relationship was different from the one she enjoyed with Burlinson. Although she had lived with Burlinson and set up housekeeping, she chose to live separately from Graham during their romance, citing career needs and a wish for more personal space.

  In addition to all the career and relationship issues swirling about Nicole in 1985, she experienced her first real family emergency. She was on the set of Windrider when she received an urgent telephone call from her mother. Janelle told her that she had some bad news. She was in the hospital, where she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Nicole was devastated. She dropped the telephone and found the producers and pleaded with them to allow her to return home. They rejected her request on the grounds that they could not afford a break in production.

  Nicole stuck it out until production was completed, then hurried home to be with her mother. “Suddenly the person that you love most in the world is losing her hair and sobbing every night,” Nicole told Premiere magazine. “It was very hard on me and it still remains a big thing in my life.”

  Janelle underwent a lumpectomy, a new procedure at that time in Australia, then followed up with chemotherapy and radiation, convinced that she was going to die. How ironic it was that Antony’s early research had been on the effects of anxiety and stress on breast cancer. Perhaps fearing that her decision to drop out of school had somehow created the anxiety that triggered the disease, Nicole nursed and took care of her mother with uncompromised compassion, even going to the trouble of qualifying as a masseuse so that she could massage her mother’s aching muscles every day.

  “It was very hard to see your mother going through such pain,” Nicole told Good Weekend magazine. “It opened my eyes to mortality, and to pain and suffering, and from that point on I was determined to support and be a part of and in some way help. Janelle’s cancer changed the family in profound and lasting ways.”

  One result of Janelle’s illness was that Antony resumed his research on breast cancer in order to find out if cognitive behavior therapy could be effective on women with advanced stages of the disease. Like most psychologists, Antony was much better at intellectualizing the problem and looking for solutions outside the family than he was in providing one-on-one support (it is a drawback of the profession). Another outgrowth was Antony’s decision to embrace “psychoncology,” a new field in which therapists work with cancer patients and their families in an effort to help them better cope with the disease. The best way to help Janelle, Antony concluded, was to find new approaches to treating the disease. As it happened, Janelle’s cancer did not recur and today, more than two decades later, she is still cancer free.

  By this point in their marriage, it had become obvious that Janelle had affected Antony’s professional life in a variety of ways. His new focus on breast cancer was an obvious example. Not so obvious was the influence she had on his viewpoints about the changing dynamics of family life in general. He began to see the anxieties and conflicts experienced by women in a more personal context.

  “Although women are more positive than men about the prospect of marriage, they are generally less content with the reality of it,” Antony wrote in his 1995 book, Family Life: Adapting to Change.. “The dual goals of career and family are more easily achieved by men. For women these goals conflict and can cause severe problems. The fact that more women than men seek professional help during the years of child rearing, when their children reach adulthood and leave home, and when their spouses retire or die, reflects the great stresses brought to bear on women who carry the emotional responsibility for most family relationships.”

  Antony understood in 1995 what had perhaps escaped his attention while he and Janelle were busying raising Nicole and Antonia—and trying to pursue their individual careers, one more successfully than the other: namely, that Janelle had paid a high personal price for her devotion to the family unit.

  ~ ~ ~

  After the release of Windrider, it was clear to everyone that Nicole was on a roll—down hill. Her next film, Watch the Shadows Dance (also known as Nightmaster in the United States), was directed by Russian-born film-maker Mark Joffe. He had directed two television series—“Fast Lane” and “Carson’s Law”—but Watch the Shadows Dance was his first feature film.

  Nineteen-year-old Nicole was asked to play the role of Amy Gabriel, a high school student who gets involved with a group of fellow students that play war games with paint guns. The male lead was played by Tom Jennings, whose first film role was in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. After completing work on Watch the Shadows Dance, he did one feature film and two television shows, then dropped out of public sight.

  Also co-starring with Nicole was Joanne Samuel, a twenty-nine-year-old veteran of ten feature films and television series, including “The Young Doctors” and Mad Max. Like Jennings, she did two more projects after work on Watch the Shadows Dance wrapped, then she, too, dropped out of sight.

  The plot of Watch the Shadows Dance revolves around the machinations of a mysterious karate teacher and the paint-gun wars, two separate themes that finally merge to create the dramatic tension in the story.

  Nicole does not have a single good line in the movie, but the camera loved her face and her mannerisms, despite the contrived tensions that constantly surrounded her. Some of the scenes seem to have been written especially for her. When a young man puts the moves on Nicole, commenting on her legs and arms, one of her “club” members steps in to protect her. Nicole keeps her cool, but when the guy leaves, she chastises her friend for stepping in. “I can look after myself without your help,” she says. “I’ll do my own fighting, thank you.”

  As it turns out, the karate teacher is a crazed war veteran, a cocaine addict that kills a drug pusher (coincidentally the same youth who accosted Nicole earlier in the film). Jennings witnesses the murder and tells the karate teacher what he saw. Not wishing to be convicted of murder, the karate teacher shows up at the paint-gun games to silence Jennings. From that point on, the resolution of the conflict proceeds along an entirely predictable course.

  The acting in Watch the Shadows Dance was not spectacular, but it was within limits of other, more successful films in this genre. The idea of a story based on paint-gun warriors was a good one and the soundtrack, most of which was written and sung by Paul Kelly, was above average. The problems with the film lay in the manner in which it was directed and edited. Visually, it never achieved a life of its own.

  For Nicole, it represented another regrettable lapse in judgment. Her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and she had made two bad films in a row. By the time 1986 ended, Nicole, although only nineteen, was pondering the end of life as she knew it.

  Chapter 3

  THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

  Nineteen-eighty-seven was a make-or-break year for Nicole. From the emotional high of “Vietnam,” she had tumbled into the despair of Windrider and Watch the Shadows Dance. She had seen it happen so many times before with Australian actors: A high-profile role, followed by local public acclaim, and then a free-fall tumble into obscurity.

  It was around this time that the twenty-year-old actress began dreaming of stardom in America. She did not want to become a local has-been; she wanted to perform in the international arena—and the key to that, at least in her case, was to make a name for herself in America. And why not? Legally, she was as much an American as she was an Australian. Hollywood was her birthright, was it not?

  Nicole’s next movie was a comedy titled The Bit Part. Co-starring Chris Haywood and Katrina Foster—and directed by Brendan Maher—it did nothing to advance Nicole’s career. The film disappeared from public view almost overnight and today it is next to impossible to find.

  Nicole took that hit on the chin and kept going. Her next project was a part on the television series, “Room to Move.” She played the role of Carol Trig, a high school track star who meets a new girl who makes her question her dedication to the sport. Also co-starring in the show was Alyssa-James Cook, with whom Nicole had worked
in “Vietnam.”

  Artistically, Nicole’s fortunes improved somewhat when she signed on to do the feature film Flirting, a coming-of-age story about adolescent romance between two boarding-school students. In the wrong hands, the film could have been another teen exploitation film like Windrider and Watch the Shadows Dance, but director John Duigan rescued it from that fate, primarily by writing the script himself. Actually, Flirting was the second film in a planned trilogy about Danny Embling, an awkward adolescent prone to stuttering and attacks of knee-jerk nerdiness.

  In 1987, Duigan was ranked among Australia’s “new wave” film-makers. He got his start in the mid-1970s with a government grant that allowed him to direct low-budget films such as The Firm Man and Trespassers. With a deft hand for merging detail with the bigger picture, he quickly gained a reputation for “serious” films that dealt with issues. Sirens, staring Hugh Grant, Sam Neill, Elle Macpherson and Portia de Rossi, is one of his better post-Flirting efforts. Released in 1994, the film explored religious and sexual issues from the viewpoint of a young British reverend.

  The Australia film community is minuscule compared to its counterparts in America and England, so it is not uncommon for directors to use the same actors over and over again, especially if they have a public following. Nicole had no reservations about signing on for Flirting because Duigan also had been her director in “Room to Move” and “Vietnam.”

  Nicole was given the role of Nicola Radcliffe, an older student at the girls’ school where the female lead, played by fifteen-year-old Thandie Newton, attended classes. Flirting was Newton’s first motion picture. The daughter of a Zimbabwean mother, a princess of the Shona tribe, and an English father, she lived in Zambia until political and social unrest forced her family to move to England. Before going to Australia to star in her first film, she received in a degree in anthropology from Cambridge University. She went on to appear in another film with Nicole, 1996’s The Leading Man, and, ironically, she did a love scene in 2000 with Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible II.