* * *
—
Even today, when friends talk about Kidman they cite her love of losing herself in other worlds. She is an avid reader, frequently seen curled up with a book, oblivious to whatever’s going on around her. That started a long time ago: by her teens, novels were a primary means of escape. She has said that it was thanks to characters such as Dorothea in Middlemarch and Natasha in War and Peace that she began to think about being an actor. She told me, “I wanted to be those women. I would live through them, get lost in them, and be devastated when the books ended.”
Nicole also had a definite wild streak. She was hitting the clubs in Sydney by the time she was 14, drawn to the bohemian side of life, befriending the transvestites who frequented her favorite joints. Already showing her affinity for avant-garde fashion, she’d doll herself up in a tutu, fishnets, and lace-up black boots, and dye her hair like a rainbow or in even more intense shades of red than her natural coloring. Other nights she’d go vintage.
But of all the pursuits she followed in her teens, it was the drama lessons that from the age of 12 she took on weekends at Sydney’s Philip Street Theater which really stirred something within her. She got some saucy parts, too, including that quintessential southern belle, Blanche du Bois, in Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire, played by Nicole at the ripe old age of 12. She’s less amused today by the cheeseball Australian films she found herself doing a few years later, such as 1983’s teen dirt-bike epic BMX Bandits and 1986’s Windrider, a romance about windsurfing (with the actor Tom Burlinson, a 29-year-old who became 18-year-old Nicole’s boyfriend)—but at the same time she doesn’t disown them. As an actor, she says, “you’re never in a position where you have an enormous amount of choices—that’s why I never judge other actors’ choices. One doesn’t know what’s behind them. Why does somebody need to do [a particular movie]? Because they have to pay the mortgage? I’ve certainly been in that position. BMX Bandits? Bring it on. I wanted to own a place. That’s how I bought my apartment. After that I always knew, if everything else went to pieces, I had a floor I could crash on.” As for the artistic side of the equation, such as it was, no matter how cartoony her parts, Kidman always comes off as a strong, memorable presence—and as killer sexy. Best of all her early Australian films is 1991’s Flirting, a girls’-school classic in which she plays the alpha prefect who turns nice.
She had begun to work steadily, but at the age of 17 two events temporarily sidetracked her career. First, she decided to see a bit of the world, bagging high-school graduation for an intoxicating few months in Amsterdam and Paris. Kidman recalls, “I was like, ‘Bring it on—bring on Europe!’” (“Bring it on” is a pet Kidman expression, a kind of exhortation to herself and others to let life happen.) That same year, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and went through chemotherapy. Kidman put everything on hold to be part of her mom’s support structure. She clearly respects and loves her dad, but her relationship with her mother seems to have been the more formative one. On more than one occasion she told me, “I still think one of my motivating forces is to make her proud of me.” When I asked Kidman to explain that more specifically, she answered, “She once said to me she wished she had had no children, which is a hard thing to hear from your mother. I think I stormed out of the house that day. But I understand what she meant, because she gave up a lot. She would have been an amazing doctor, she speaks French, she plays the piano, she’s far more brilliant than me at everything.” How many of us feel that same way about our parents’ missed opportunities and end up taking on the world in their name?
* * *
—
What set Kidman’s career in true motion was a 1986 Australian TV mini-series, Vietnam, which suggested she had real acting mettle. She took off in the role of Megan Goddard, an anti-war, anti-Establishment student, got nice reviews, and, out of that success, was eventually cast in 1988, at the age of 21, in the film Dead Calm, directed by Phillip Noyce and produced, as was Vietnam, by Australia’s legendary Kennedy-Miller Productions. This was the project that would bring her to America and alter the trajectory of her career. A thriller, Dead Calm required her to outfox, outsail, and outfight a psychotic interloper—we see her together, untogether, in the altogether, and her performance never falls apart.
The 1989 film, a smash in Australia and a player in the States too, came to the attention of the screenwriter Robert Towne, who was then at work with Tom Cruise on Days of Thunder. Towne, who is no monkey, showed Dead Calm to Cruise. Kidman had already been brought to America for a publicity junket for Dead Calm, been signed by ICM agent Sam Cohn, and flown back across the Pacific to Tokyo, where she was doing more promotional chores, when she got a call saying Tom Cruise wanted to meet her. When I asked what her first reaction to the summons was, she laughed, saying, “I thought, Wow! This is America! Tom Cruise wants to meet me. He made Top Gun and Cocktail—the films I grew up watching.” And the fairy tale began. Before she had time to straighten her hair, it seemed, she was in Daytona Beach, Florida, starring opposite Cruise in Days of Thunder.
Enter Cupid. Drumrolls. Music. Fireworks! Kidman was smitten: “He basically swept me off my feet. I fell madly, passionately in love. And as happens when you fall in love, my whole plan in terms of what I wanted for my life—I was like, ‘Forget it. This is it.’ I was consumed by it, willingly. And I was desperate to have a baby with him. I didn’t care if we were married. That’s what I wish I’d done.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, a few months later, Cruise’s divorce from the actress Mimi Rogers came through, and America’s most American leading man proposed to Australia’s latest hot export.
* * *
—
It’s hard to imagine a more dramatic personal and sociological change than the one Kidman experienced the moment she hooked up with Cruise. She went from being an actress who had begun to taste success—and who had always insisted on living on her own, even during her various romances—to a woman inside the engine of the Hollywood machine. As for the first piece of celluloid that came out of their alliance, let’s just say that time has not been kind to Days of Thunder. Still, it’s fascinating to see how Hollywood, led by producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer and British director Tony Scott, packaged her raw sexuality, putting a commercial gloss on it.
After Days of Thunder, she began working on Billy Bathgate for director Robert Benton, who recently teamed up with the actress again. I spent time with them this September on the Paramount lot, where they were re-recording fragments of dialogue for The Human Stain. It was quite an eye-opener to watch her work with Benton and the sound technicians. Kidman is a pro, but not a hack. She’ll want to keep doing a line or scene until it feels true, but she also seems to have unusually direct access to all sorts of inner emotions, which she is often able to summon in a matter of seconds and articulate with authenticity.
There’s a bit of a father-daughter dynamic between Benton and Kidman. When we went to lunch they both cracked up about the old days when Kidman, who married Cruise in the middle of Billy Bathgate, would go missing in action. Benton recalled, “One day when I couldn’t find her, somebody said, ‘Oh! Nicole is skydiving,’ and I almost had a heart attack. I thought, God! Like I don’t have enough problems.” Benton sat his star down and gave her a good talking-to. She solemnly listened and, as Benton laughingly told me, was jumping out of planes again soon after with her new husband. The thrill both apparently get from a sense of danger seems to have been an aphrodisiac for Nicole and Tom, who would also amuse themselves with adrenaline-pumping fun such as spins on Cruise’s Harley.
It’s clear that the couple’s chemistry worked big-time. When Nicole speaks of her years with Cruise she describes a devotion without clauses and without doubt. “I was willing to give up everything,” she explains. “I now see that as part of me. I’m willing to do that—I do it when I do a movie too. I’m willing to go, ‘Yeah, bring it on, consume
me, intoxicate me.’ I want to feel alive—I want to reel, basically. I was reeling with Tom and I loved it and I would have walked to the end of the earth. That meant giving up a lot of things that were very important to me.” Kidman doesn’t pretend that she was impervious to the glare that came with being Mrs. Cruise. “You’re being watched and scrutinized, and that slowly affects you. But it’s also deeply romantic, because it feels like there’s only the two of you and you’re in it together, as if you’re in a cocoon, and you become very dependent on each other.”
Apart from her role opposite Cruise in Ron Howard’s immigrant drama, Far and Away, which was a nonstarter when it came out in 1992, Kidman’s career wasn’t on the front burner during the first few years of the marriage. Instead of klieg lights, her days were filled with squeals and gurgles, for it was in 1993 that the couple adopted a girl, Isabella. (In 1995 they would add to the family by adopting their son, Connor.) But ultimately the bubblelike existence had to end. This wasn’t the Dark Ages. The suffragettes had come and gone, Virginia Woolf had written A Room of One’s Own decades before, and Kidman, very much a woman of her time and of her upbringing, could not stifle her need to express herself. She started to pursue a number of parts. There was, for instance, 1995’s Batman Forever, directed by Joel Schumacher, in which she played the love interest, Dr. Chase Meridian.
Schumacher’s stories of life on the Batman Forever set with Kidman are telling. By that time she had become a certified member of Hollywood royalty, but it seems that that had killed off neither her sense of spontaneity nor her sense of democracy. There was, for instance, the day she got a craving for some kind of iced mocha concoction from Starbucks. As Schumacher recalls, she didn’t just order one for herself. “There were hundreds of people working on Batman, and, sure enough, an hour later, some kind of truck arrived with all these frozen drinks, and everyone had an iced mocha thingy.” But while Kidman helped to put the sass into Batman Forever, offering a glimpse of her flair for camp, the performance didn’t do much to thaw the ice-princess image that she had by now developed in the media.
In point of fact, Kidman had never been cold or rude to the press, but somehow her perfect behavior as Mrs. Cruise—the couple was famous for their highly controlled public appearances—and the sorts of roles Americans had seen her in, along with the presumption that she was being cast only to curry favor with her husband, all combined to make it seem as if she were high-and-mighty, exquisite, but made of marble. She, too, may have bought into some of that: “I felt I didn’t deserve to be there in my own right, and so throughout I wasn’t there as Nicole—I was there as Tom’s wife.”
What finally changed this was To Die For, which was also released in 1995. It was not a part that was handed to her on a silver platter. Even though she had a decent track record by then and was married to such a box-office biggie, she was not considered A-list and had to work to convince the director, Gus Van Sant, that she had what it took to play Suzanne Stone-Maretto, a woman who is so obsessed with becoming a TV star that she is willing to do anything to make that happen, including seducing a weirdo high-school student (Joaquin Phoenix) and persuading him to do away with her lunkish husband (Matt Dillon). Kidman has never been the type to let pride get in the way of work she desires. Even today she’ll do the requisite campaigning if she is after a role and she isn’t being pursued for it; she has an instinctive grasp of the ebb and flow of fame, of the fact that you have to get up on your board if you want to ride its waves.
Van Sant, whose deadpan way with a story is almost Warholian, recalls, “She got my number somewhere. I don’t know if it was hard to find it or not, but she just called me and said hi. She phoned right when Meg Ryan dropped out of the movie, which involved her knowing inside information. Our second choice was Patricia Arquette, and we even had a third choice, Jennifer Jason Leigh. Nicole was somewhere on the list. I had met her a couple of times. When she called she told me that she knew she wasn’t on the top of my list, and I tried to kind of say, ‘Well, I don’t know about that . . . ’ But she just cut me off and said, ‘Look, you don’t have to pretend that I am.’ I said, ‘O.K.,’ and then she said, ‘But listen, I’m destined to play this part.’ That worked really well with me because I believe in destiny.”
It did seem as if she had been born to play this knife-sharp black comedy, written to perfection by Buck Henry. She found humor in her character’s desperation and yet also made that desperation feel painfully real. She was so wickedly funny that at the time I remember being surprised—as were many others—that there was edge and bite underneath all that Hollywood polish. This was the beginning of her transformation from perfect escort to flesh-and-blood actor. When Portrait of a Lady, directed by Jane Campion and featuring Kidman as the headstrong heiress, Isabel Archer, was released a year later, the project’s ambition underscored the fact that Kidman might just become a big deal in her own right—even if the film itself wasn’t a breakthrough for anyone.
It was inevitable that performing in these kinds of films would affect Kidman’s sense of herself. She says, “I realized I could be fulfilled creatively and that I had given that up. I think this happens to women who re-enter the workforce. They go, ‘Hold on, there’s a world out there, and I wouldn’t mind being a part of it.’ I tried to deny it because it would have been so much easier for me to be satiated by being a wife. I wish it could have been part of my trajectory, but it wasn’t.”
Kidman imagined, like millions of women, that she’d be able to fulfill herself through her work and also be a dedicated wife and mother. Her goal was to do a worthwhile project every year or so and still have enough time and energy to give her family its due. For a while the plan worked, or at least it looked that way from the outside. The actress appeared in The Peacemaker in 1997 and in Practical Magic in 1998 (two films that ended up stiffing) while continuing to show up at her husband’s side, always looking like a million bucks, for every important occasion.
* * *
—
And then came an opportunity that seemed heaven-sent: the late Stanley Kubrick’s decision to cast Kidman and Cruise in his take on sexual obsession and jealousy, Eyes Wide Shut. The couple had a chance not only to work with one of the movies’ true greats on a film that promised to be electrifying, but also to work together. And so, in late 1996, they picked up their household, moved to London, and dedicated themselves to implementing Kubrick’s vision. It was not just a nine-to-five collaboration. Kidman and Cruise’s bond with Kubrick proved to be such that their lives became intertwined with his, and the film somehow bled into their relationship.
The two actors, especially Nicole, are known for living and breathing their parts when working; this time their roles were a bored husband and wife who get caught in a web of sexual pretending that then turns dangerously real and winds up threatening their marriage. Sounds like a recipe for an emotional Molotov cocktail that would test many a couple’s relationship. On top of that, the shoot, originally scheduled for 4 months, kept getting extended, and in the end Tom and Nicole would park themselves in London for 18 months. As Kidman remembers it, “Tom had such a very strong connection with Stanley, and so did I. That resonated through our lives and marriage—it had such a profound effect.” Even when the actors and their director weren’t actually shooting, they’d spend hours together every day. Nicole says, “Stanley saw Tom and I in the most extreme situations because of the way in which he works. He breaks you down. He challenged all of my concrete, solid bases that I’d set around myself, and basically disturbed them, and made me far more introspective.” Nicole does not get literal about how this experience shook things up, but she couldn’t be more clear that it did; the couple was also deeply affected by Kubrick’s sudden death during postproduction. But she has an artist’s acceptance of the entire experience as ultimately valuable, no matter how painful.
When we were talking I was honest with her about my reactions to the movie, which final
ly came out in the summer of 1999. I told her that, despite the film’s visual punch, the pre-release fuss and hype seemed way overblown considering the final product, which to my mind is not the revolutionary work that was promised but rather a bourgeois attempt at titillation, an effort at illuminating truths about sexuality and relationships which have been treated with much more insight by other writers and directors. Nicole responded in a way that is characteristic of her. She was not defensive, but heard me with real interest and openness. She then stood by both her director and her leading man: “I still think Tom was mesmerizing in it, but that’s partly because I know what he went through. To me, the themes are so important and so complex—and who knows what Stanley would have done [with it] if he had had more time, if he’d lived.”
* * *
—
In the fall of 1998, Kidman was making new headlines with her performance onstage in London in The Blue Room, which required her to be nude for 10 seconds. One night backstage Kidman found a big bouquet of red roses in her dressing room with a note from the Australian director Baz Luhrmann that read something like: “She sings, she dances, she dies, how can you refuse?” Luhrmann was referring to Satine, the doomed heroine of the movie he was planning to shoot next, Moulin Rouge. He was following his gut instinct that Kidman would shine in the part of a divinely romantic showgirl who drives folks wild, sacrifices for her art, and dies tragically of tuberculosis on her beloved stage. But Kidman was still perceived by audiences as distant and cold; there was resistance to her from some of the powers behind the project. Nevertheless, Luhrmann and his casting director were passionate about their choice. They fought until the deal was done, and a role that was loaded with risk for both star and director turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to Kidman’s career. Not only did it show what a multifaceted talent she is, but the part, which had her running off not with the rich producer but instead with the struggling writer, undercut her public image as a cool careerist and plainly rendered her human and warm. Whether she is flying through the air on a trapeze, singing an over-the-top love song with her leading man, Ewan McGregor, or breathing her last breath, her performance is big, bold, vulnerable when called for, and just right in terms of tone.
Vanity Fair's Women on Women Page 38