I am talking to an Australian woman about Nicole Kidman, and the crucial mystery is there at the start: “I’ve known her 20 years, and I’ve spent a staggering amount of time with her, but I feel I don’t know her. Because what she gives you is what you want. A lot of actors are like that. They don’t exist exactly when they aren’t playing a part.”
Kidman can be great and serious. She is an Oscar-winner. Sometimes you can believe she might play any part. But she is also, heart and soul, a sexual celebrity, someone who, close to 40, is not just ready but seemingly proud to give her sexy come-hither look to some magazine. Her appetite for life is not snobbish or elitist. On the internet, you can get a lubricious roundup of every nude or semi-nude scene Kidman has ever done. She does expensive perfume ads; she does eye-candy covers; she will drop her clothes if the film requires it, to air out that elegant Australian bod (she does wish she was a few inches shorter, with those inches added onto her breasts — but there you are, she is human).
Like Katharine Hepburn, the name she often invokes as her idol or her model, Kidman has a rich, muscular, “ordinary” side to her. She does not hide that Australian accent. She can come on glamorous, then collapse in giggles like the girl next door who was just trying on a famous older sister’s gown. I dare say that, as she grows older, she will become weathered, a great, lined old lady like Hepburn, a mistress of the art of acting and of the cult of her own high-mindedness.
But even if she becomes Dame Nicole Kidman, in those greedy eyes the hunger might persist for the good old days.
We like stars. In the past few years, we have hurried off to see and be smitten by Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Elisabeth Shue, Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry and so on. But wait a minute. There are a couple of names in that list that are already not quite as “alive” or as “fresh” as others. The movies are a street where young flesh is taken for granted. Just as the young flesh comes, so it goes. And the audience that loved to think once of going to bed with x or y blithely consigns the same women to the scrapheap. Kidman, who will be 40 in June 2007, knows that the public that is crazy for her can turn cold the next minute.
Last year was not her best. Movieline magazine declared that the two worst bits of casting chemistry of the year were Kidman and Sean Penn in The Interpreter and Kidman and Will Ferrell in Bewitched. There have been other “disappointing” films along the way, from Far and Away with Tom Cruise in 1992 to the remake of The Stepford Wives two years ago. I don’t mean to put all those films in the same basket. But the pattern is clear — and Kidman knows it. Nor is she too proud to admit that some things were done for the money, with fingers crossed.
Her life is laid out in professional demands: prepare for a picture; shoot the picture; do publicity; do photo shoots; attend awards events; do television interviews; see the children; be with the family; exercise every day for several hours, run, run, run — where do you think such slenderness comes from? The strain is terrible, not least because, in the end, it reifies or mocks the closest ties in life, the things you ought to care the most about if you are really a great, sensitive, kind artist, as Kidman is.
I don’t say she’s the greatest actress ever, or even the best of her time — though I think she is the bravest, the most adventurous and the most varied of her age. Just remember these: Moulin Rouge!, Birthday Girl, The Others, The Hours, Dogville — that great run. And Birth, which was released two years ago. I know, many of you may say: Birth? What was that? I never saw it. I had better seek it out. Yes, you should, because it is her best, and she knows it went unseen, and forgotten. In Birth, and in a few others, she finds a shining, profound intimacy. But it was a commercial disaster.
The history of Birth is, allegedly, that one day the young British director Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast was his only previous feature film) had the idea for a movie: “There’s this little kid and he tells a woman he’s her dead husband — and he’s 10 years old.” He brought in Jean-Claude Carrière, the accomplished French screenwriter. Kidman asked to see the script. Glazer told me she “had a very peculiar response to it: she talked about it as if she’d written it herself”.
He explained: “Nicole understood the part at a low frequency. At base level. So all the changes I made, all the stuff I threw at her at a moment’s notice, she absorbed. She inhabited the idea to the point that she could tell the story with her face. She understood that tacitly. How to get the inside on the outside.” That kind of instinctive rapport is fascinating, but still it comes as a surprise when Glazer says he didn’t talk about birth or mourning with Kidman, because “I didn’t want to subject her to too much analysis”.
Whereas writers take immense pride in working at the dull stone of a language for years, trying to free the unique words of a story, actresses believe that another persona must ravish them and occupy them so that the shock comes close to stopping them from breathing.
If you spend time with actresses, you will soon enough notice a kind of fresh emptiness, a shining vacancy, a need, waiting to be filled.
You can see and feel it before the word “Action”, in that inhalation that means to summon up another life. Actresses want to be invaded by strangers. It is wanton, reckless, absolutely not respectable, and it’s one reason why some feminist theory regards acting as a metaphor for prostitution. But actresses need to be rescued from their void — at least for a moment.
Kidman is unusually smart among actresses, but still she clings to instinct and, from time to time, is heard to say things like, “I don’t quite know who I am, or what I am, or where I’m headed.” That uncertainty — by a great paradox — is vital to our sense of knowing her.
Thomson picks his highlights
To Die For (1995)
As a murderously ambitious TV weather girl: “This is a movie in which an actress begins to see the chance that she might be a phenomenon.”
Moulin Rouge! (2001)
As the doomed courtesan Satine: “Baz Luhrmann is looking for some hint of repressed abandon. He will admit later he is surprised by the intensity of what he gets.”
The Hours (2002)
As Virginia Woolf: “She is no longer Nicole Kidman. Her walk — flat-footed, hunched shoulders — is a shape we have never seen in her vaulting body.”
Dogville (2003)
“She gives a fine, watchful performance as Grace, this stranger who wants to be liked and who takes mounting abuse. She looks lovely, and it is easy to feel this loveliness is an inner, spiritual force shining out of her.”
Birth (2004)
As a widow convinced that a young boy is her dead husband: “The best thing she has ever done, and the work that meant the most to her.”
