NICOLE KIDMAN
by David Thomson
Bloomsbury £18.99 pp311

Elizabeth Taylor and Nicole Kidman are very different screen divas, although both are Oscar winners and both have experienced the spirit-sapping burden of high-profile celebrity marriages. Today, the much-married Taylor is constantly earmarked for impending death in the tabloids, while Kidman, who is staring into the chasm that faces all work-hungry actresses approaching 40, has just embarked on a second marriage, this time to a country rock singer.

Taylor was robbed of her childhood and emerged into adulthood with a fragile sense of self-worth, despite having borne the burden of being the family breadwinner through her Hollywood contract. Her mother, Sara, was loving, but manipulative and controlling. Elizabeth’s father, Francis, was an emotionally remote, weak-minded alcoholic, under the thumb of Sara, who shut him out of all decisions about Elizabeth’s career as a child actor.

Once she had grown up, Taylor didn’t really have a career plan. She won her first Oscar for Butterfield 8 (1960) despite making the film against her will, and chose appalling roles for the last 10 years of her effective screen life (after her second Oscar-winning role, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?). Her most powerful yearning was to be loved and her greatest achievement in her own estimation has been her campaigning on behalf of Aids sufferers. Nonetheless, she was, in the words of Richard Burton, a “consummate cinematic technician”.

Kidman, on the other hand, enjoyed a more conventional childhood, and has proved more driven in her adult career than Taylor ever was, even though she, too, has made some appalling choices. Kidman, of course, is some way off 55, when Taylor retired from movies, and David Thomson, who considers her to be addicted to the actor’s drug of being other people, imagines that she will carry on for as long as Katharine Hepburn did.

One of the most prominent themes of Taraborrelli’s biography is his subject’s struggle with health problems. She has had pneumonia several times, a fractured back (twice), a brain tumour (benign), addictions to alcohol and prescription drugs, two hip replacements, candidiasis, osteoporosis. She also took overdoses on two occasions. Taraborrelli notes that, between 1980 and 1985, she was given more than 1,000 prescriptions for different drugs. Elsewhere, he suggests that, “with her Christian Science background at work, but in a twisted way, it was as if she could actually will herself to be sick, and with any ailment she chose, if she focused on the malady hard enough”.

I enjoyed Elizabeth much more than I had expected. Taraborrelli keeps the story moving and persuades us that Taylor is a more complex, courageous and likable person than her pampered celebrity image suggests. He has unearthed plenty of new sources and, while Taylor herself has read the manuscript for accuracy, this has not caused the author “to sugar-coat any of the more provocative elements in her story”. Her well-known, alcohol-fuelled relationship with Burton induced her to give full rein to histrionics in her private life. As Taraborrelli puts it: “She was in a league all her own when it came to the cataclysmic.”

Thomson is convinced that Nicole Kidman is worthy of our admiration as a great actress, “the bravest, the most adventurous and the most varied of her time”. He is unable to excuse a string of turkeys, but he prizes highly her roles in such films as To Die For, Birthday Girl, Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, Dogville, Birth, and Fur (as yet unreleased). It is clear that Kidman is also his No 1 pin-up. “Millions of us could recognise the sweet curve of her bottom in the dark,” he asserts, seeking to make us complicit in his wet-dream fantasy. “Millions more have had that palpable illusion help them make it through the night.”

This is an odd book without an obvious audience. Those who seek celebrity tittle-tattle will be sorely disappointed, while even fans of Thomson’s idiosyncratic criticism will be exasperated by his discursive self-indulgence. At one point, when discussing Cold Mountain, he wanders into an elaborate, page-long metaphor (“the attitude of a golfer on the 11th green at Augusta”) for Kidman’s method of selecting her roles. Passages such as this, and a peculiar chapter in which he recalls a dream of visiting the brothel from Buñuel’s Belle de Jour and finding Kidman dressed as a maid while Catherine Deneuve is being tormented by a Gestapo officer and an elderly Chinaman, give the impression that he has felt impelled to pad out his material. The point of this chapter, and of the book as a whole, is that the seductive actress of Kidman’s youth has matured into “that wondrous impassive depravity of Deneuve’s”, that she has put her ego aside, that she has achieved a serenity, a majesty, and thereby a greater intimacy with her audience. This study would have been much better at 100 or so fewer pages and with fewer cringe-worthy confessional asides.

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