Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  There was also another reason for her to undertake a taxing project—it would take her mind off of her faltering marriage. She did what men have done for centuries when their marriages take a turn for the worse: she became a workaholic.

  Not unhappy with that attitude was London-born director Jez Butterworth, who had directed only one other film before signing on to do Birthday Girl. The fact that he had written the script would help him with his duties as a director, but what he needed most of all was an experienced lead actress who would push herself to the max. Despite her glamorous image outside the movie industry, within the industry Nicole was known for her obsessive attention to detail and her willingness to put pressure on herself that no self-respecting director would ever inflict upon her (Sidney Kubrick, the only exception).

  Starring opposite Nicole was British actor, Ben Chaplin, who plays a lonely bank teller named John who attempts to put some excitement into his drab life by ordering a Russian bride from an Internet dating service called “From Russia With Love.”

  The movie begins with John arriving at the airport to pick up his new bride, a dark-haired woman with excessive eye makeup who goes by the name of Nadia. To John, a seasoned introvert, Nadia seems shy and forlorn, perhaps even homesick, so as he drives her to his suburban home, he tries to make polite conversation with her. He soon becomes suspicious after she answers “yes” to every question and he asks her, as a test, if she is a giraffe, to which she gleefully answers “yes.” Minutes later, she hangs her head out the car window and vomits.

  When they arrive at his house, the first thing he does is place a telephone call to the dating service to tell them that they have made a terrible mistake. He had ordered an English speaking bride and they had sent the wrong order. After no one answered the telephone, he left a voicemail plea for someone to call him. It was, he explains in a desperate voice, an emergency.

  No one with the dating service ever returns his calls, so he settles into sort of a routine with Nadia. He gives her a Russian/English dictionary and tries to make the most of what he sees as a bad situation. She responds by giving him sex of such intensity and variety that he soon forgets his reservations about having her in his home.

  Not long after Nadia arrives, her cousin Alexei (played by Vincent Cassel) shows up with his friend Yuri (played by Mathieu Kassovitz). Things go well for a while, but when John asks them to leave, Yuri goes berserk and threatens to hurt Nadia if John does not pay him money. To get the money, John robs his own bank, carting out bundles of bills in two guitar cases. Once Yuri has the money, Nadia starts speaking English and showing affection for Yuri. As it turns out, John’s relationship with Nadia was all part of a money-making scam. Of course, the money soon becomes secondary to resolving the conflict of who gets the girl—and therein lies the heart of the drama.

  Making the movie was physically less demanding on Nicole than other movies she had made, but emotionally it was a challenge. To do it properly she knew she had to not only change her appearance, but also had to change her speech.

  During rehearsals, she showed up each morning with the same comment: “Oh, shit! I can’t do this!” Cassel and Kassovitz were in much the same position. Both men were born in France and they had to learn Russian the same way Nicole did.

  On their first day of rehearsals, the two men showed up together and asked Nicole, half jokingly, if she had learned her lines in Russian yet.

  “Oh, yes,” she later told Interview. “I’ve learned all my Russian. I have an accent which is from the suburbs to the south of Moscow.”

  The two men turned pale and looked at each other, one saying to the other, “Shit! We’re in trouble!”

  Ben Chaplin had problems of his own starring opposite Nicole, for it meant sitting around naked with her for long periods of time between takes. Recounted Chaplin: “Nicole and I would look at each other and say the most God-awful, stupid things like, ‘Can you believe this weather?’ ‘Do you think they’ll serve the good fish for lunch?’ It’s almost like being in a doctor’s office. You can’t wait until it’s over, even if it is Nicole Kidman across a bed from you.”

  Production on Birthday Girl wrapped in 2000, but the film was not released until January 2002. Critics were not dazzled by the movie. Wrote Joe Leydon of the San Francisco Examiner: “Nicole Kidman is radiantly beautiful, even while dressed in frumpy Russian frocks and wearing enough eye shadow to suggest an unusually sexy racoon . . . Birthday Girl may be intended as a romantic thriller, but it is sorely lacking in romance and thrills. It’s the closest thing to a totally useless movie that you’ll find at megaplexes this weekend.”

  The New York Times’s critic Elvis Mitchell was impressed by Nicole’s “high-hurdle sprinter’s figure,” but found the plot insubstantial: “By the end, all Birthday Girl does is toss off a few sparks. It doesn’t generate enough down-and-dirty firepower to burst into flames.”

  The Sydney Morning Herald was more encouraging. Commenting on the criticism that Nicole seldom seems to connect emotionally with her male leads, critic Paul Byrnes found her on-screen relationship with Chaplin refreshing: “The tagline would have echoed that famous earlier one, ‘Garbo talks.’ As in ‘Kidman loves!’ She gets to show a tenderness we’ve rarely seen, but it’s combined with the comic skills we saw in To Die For. It’s a great part and a great performance.”

  When Nicole went on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno to promote the film, she had very little to say about it. Mostly she talked about how frightened she was to play a Russian—the main fear being that she would fall flat on her face. She continued that line of thought with an interview for the Today Show: “I tend to get sent these things that are different, unusual, which is what you want as an actor . . . But I did have trepidation when they said it is a Russian girl. I thought, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I am going to be able to pull that off. You can look like an absolute fool, an actor trying to speak another language—but I threw myself into it.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Even before Nicole “threw herself” into Birthday Girl, she was obsessing about another movie named Moulin Rouge. One evening, during the New York production of The Blue Room, a bouquet of long-stemmed red roses with Nicole’s name on it was delivered backstage. The roses caught her attention because, believe it or not, no one had ever given her long-stemmed red roses. Were they from Tom, a reaffirmation of his love for her? No, they were from Australian movie director Baz Luhrmann, who wanted something from her. The note attached to the flowers read: “I have this great character. She sings, she dances, and then she dies.”

  In a strange sort of way, that was the way Nicole saw her own life, so how could she not respond in a favorable manner to Luhrmann’s teaser. She knew him, but not very well (a decade ago they had worked together guest-editing the Australian edition of Vogue), so she called him and asked to see the script.

  There was no script, Luhrmann explained, merely a booklet composed of photographs, drawings, and captions. There was one other bit of information she should be aware of before accepting his offer, he explained—the movie was a musical and she would be asked to actually sing, not lip-snyc to another woman’s voice.

  Nicole liked to sing—she sang to her children often, although they usually asked her to stop—but she had no idea if she would be able to sing professionally. Nonetheless, she readily said yes, figuring she would simply rely on her innate ability to mimic with deadly accuracy, only to be told the second surprise of the conversation—namely, that all the actors chosen for the movie would be asked to go to Sydney, without compensation, to rehearse for three to four months at his headquarters, a former insane asylum. How could Nicole possibly resist an offer like that?

  Luhrmann was not so much eccentric as he was headstrong to recreate the vision he had for the movie. He first got the idea while visiting India in 1994 to research an opera. He went to see a locally produced movie and was fascinated at the way the director had blended corny comedy with drama and then set it off with music. It was t
otally off-the-wall, but everyone in the theater, himself included, was riveted to the screen, wondering what outlandish event would next appear.

  When he returned to Sydney, he told his staff he planned to do a movie unlike any other ever done. It would be a musical with a serious plot line, but the characters would all be larger-than-life caricatures that would be surrounded by lavish sets bathed in vibrant hues of red and blue. He didn’t have a plot in mind yet, but he already knew that he wanted the actors to sing live on stage—and he wanted them to sing popular contemporary songs that would be recognizable to the public. It would be a musical unlike anything Hollywood had ever envisioned.

  No one doubted Luhrmann’s ability to bring the idea to life. His 1996 production of Romeo and Juliet had been universally hailed and had established him as a serious filmmaker with a grand vision who could reshape the familiar into something new and extraordinary.

  Once he decided to make the movie, Luhrmann had to decide on a story line. “I wanted to deal with the Orphean myth: ‘Idealistic young man with a gift descends into the underworld looking for idealistic perfect love, finds her, tries to rescue her from that underworld. He makes a very human mistake, loses that love forever and is scarred,’” he explained to Movieline. “That myth is about that moment that comes for us all when you realize that some relationships, no matter how perfect, cannot be. People die. Doors close. You won’t always be young. You go through that journey, and in place of the gifts of youth come the gifts of spiritual growth. You’re bigger inside.”

  Where better for that vision to take place than in a nineteenth century Parisian nightclub, where money could buy literally anything, including love, for a reasonable price. Once Luhrmann had the vision and the setting for his motion picture, which he decided to call Moulin Rouge, all that remained was to people his fantasy with actors who could make his characters come to life.

  To do that, he spent three months going door to door, looking for just the right actors. For the role of Harold Zidler, the nightclub owner, he chose veteran character actor Jim Broadbent. Jim Leguizamo was asked to play Toulouse-Lautrec, and Richard Roxburgh was tapped for the role of the womanizing Duke of Monroth.

  The male and female leads were the last cast. He pretty much considered every male and female actor that was available. Catherine Zeta-Jones was high on his list to play Satine, the ambitious courtesan torn between getting ahead in life and finding true love, primarily because she had enjoyed a successful career in musical comedy in London, but, after pondering every angle, he ended up passing over her because he felt that she was not emotionally eccentric enough to be convincing. Nicole attracted his attention because he felt she had both a girl-next-door quality and a dangerous, unpredictable quality about her. When he saw her electric performance in The Blue Room, he was certain she was perfect for the role of Satine.

  Heath Ledger was the front-runner for a long time for the role of Christian, the penniless writer, but, in the end, he decided that the nineteen-year-old was simply too young to do the character justice. Instead, he went with Ewan McGregor, whom he had auditioned in the mid-1990s to play Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.

  Luhrmann’s preference was to select his male and female leads and then bring them together to see if there would be any chemistry, but he soon realized that would be impractical with the two actors he had in mind, so he invited everyone to Sydney for rehearsals. If any of the principles failed to live up to his expectations, insofar as the singing and dancing was concerned, then they would be replaced. Everyone knew that and considered it an acceptable risk.

  To Luhrmann’s delight, when Nicole and Ewan arrived for rehearsals, there seemed to be an instant chemistry between the two actors. They were as playful together as cats on a lazy day. He appreciated her daring and her beauty, and she appreciated his youth and optimism, qualities that she—at age thirty-three—yearned to revisit.

  Nicole also demonstrated a playful chemistry with Luhrmann. A decade earlier, when they did a photo shoot for the Australian edition of Vogue, they met for the first time at a restaurant where the photographs were to be taken. Nicole’s first impression of him was of how blatantly “Australian” he was; she was also somewhat taken aback by a loud, hacking cough he seemingly exercised at every opportunity. Despite the cough, she decided then that she hoped she would someday work with him.

  Nicole caught Luhrmann’s attention because of the loud, boisterous way she interacted with the other people involved in the photo shoot. Years later, he recalled that meeting in a conversation with Nicole for Interview magazine: “When I met you, you were like so many of the girls I knew growing up—so crazy, so noisy. I say noisy because I remember you were eating along and suddenly ‘Yahh!’ –you let out a big scream. I can’t remember if they threw us out, but I think they wanted to.”

  One week before rehearsals began, Nicole got cold feet and begged Luhrmann to let her go. He refused, telling her she was there for the duration. The rehearsals were filled with surprises. Everyone was shocked at how well Nicole sang and how poorly she danced. She went into rehearsals thinking she could not sing and pretty sure that she was athletic enough to handle the dance routines. She was wrong on both counts. Her voice was surprisingly engaging and her dancing was the equivalent of two left feet. The dancing was what surprised her the most, for she had always considered herself very athletic, a tomboy in diva’s skin. But the deeper they went into rehearsals, the more confident Nicole became in her ability to do the role justice.

  All of the actors spent long days doing readings, improvising, and taking singing and dancing lessons. Tom, who was in Sydney filming his Mission Impossible sequel, stopped by Luhrmann’s headquarters often to show support for Nicole—or was it because he had heard the same rumors about Nicole and Ewan that everyone else had heard?

  “Of course, people said, ‘Nicole and Ewan are having an affair. They’re inseparable,’” Luhrmann told Movieline. “People love stories like that. I’m not surprised by it. It can happen. But as far as I know, there was a line. It just didn’t happen. But it was very close. I mean, look, they’re two gorgeous-looking people.”

  On the last night of rehearsals, Luhrmann gave a party for the cast and introduced them to absinthe, a hallucinogenic green substance favored by the bohemian sub-culture at the turn of the century. Everyone went crazy that night, but, thanks to the drug, no one was able to remember anything the next morning.

  When they went from rehearsals to actual filming, the pressure to perform increased dramatically. Their singing and dancing was no longer pretend, it was now for real and the cameras were ready to roll, to capture their every move.

  Tragically, on the day production was scheduled to begin Luhrmann received word that his father had died of skin cancer. He left to attend the funeral, and the cast stood about in stunned disbelief, grieving for the director’s loss, but also wondering if the entire project would be jinxed.

  One week later, on November 1, Luhrmann returned and picked up where he had left off; it was a painful time for him, but the deeper he got into production, the more he was able to put his grief aside, at least temporarily.

  Moulin Rouge begins with Christian going to Paris to write about love, even though he has never been in love. After befriending Toulouse-Lautrec, he is asked to co-write a musical. He goes to the Moulin Rouge, the most ostentatious performance hall in the city, where the stage is filled with can-can dancers, musicians and singers.

  Satine makes a spectacular entrance on a swing suspended over the audience and sings “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and then “Material Girl.” She faints during one of her songs and is taken backstage, where she coughs up blood. The Duke of Monroth arrives to meet her and she becomes convinced that he will become her patron. She mistakes Christian for the Duke, then she has to hide him when the real Duke arrives.

  After the Duke leaves, Christian comes from his hiding place and asks, “Before, when you thought I was the Duke, you said that you loved
me and I wondered if . . .,”

  “If it was just an act?” says Satine, finishing his sentence.

  “Yes.”

  “Of course,” she says.

  Christian says that it feels real enough to him.

  “Christian, I’m a courtesan. I’m paid to make men believe what they want to believe.”

  “How silly of me. To think that you could fall in love with someone like me.”

  Of course, Satine has fallen in love with Christian. Her dilemma is whether to pursue true love with Christian or financial security with the Duke. The love triangle becomes more complicated when Christian writes a similar romantic predicament into the musical, prompting the Duke to pledge to kill Christian if Satine does not do the show the way he wants and, on top of that, sleep with him.

  It is at this point that Satine learns that she is dying of consumption. Moulin Rouge owner Harold Zidler tells Satine she must break Christian’s heart to save his life. “Hurt him to save him,” he advises.

  Satine takes his advice and tells Christian that she has decided to go away with the Duke. The story ends the only way it possibly could—with Satine dying on stage.

  There were times during production when Nicole felt she would die on stage. Early on, she broke her rib during a lift sequence in one of the dance numbers and had to take several weeks off to recover at her home in Sydney. Luckily, Tom was there to take care of her and the children. She used the time to stretch out on her sofa and rehearse her songs for upcoming scenes.

  On another occasion, she was walking down the stairs during the “Pink Diamonds’ routine, when she stepped on some feathers and missed her footing, falling and tearing the cartilage in her knee. She didn’t realize the seriousness of her injury for several days and continued working, denying that she was hurt, even though it was apparent to everyone around her that she was.