While the hoopla that seems to accompany her every move continues outside her London hotel room, Nicole Kidman is curled up on the sofa, under a big fluffy blanket, her skyscraper-high black stilettos kicked off and discarded before her. Could she be taking refuge from the press pack as she attends the premier of The Golden Compass, the first of Philip Pullman’s fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, to make it to the big screen? No – “I’m sorry, but I’m really cold,” she says. “I’ve just got in from Australia, and now I’m freezing.”

You may have seen the most recent pictures of Kidman, emerging from an Australian court, pale blue eyes wide open with the look of the hunted, after telling a judge that she had feared for her life after being chased in a car by a paparazzi photographer, Jamie Fawcett. “I was frightened and worried about [an] accident,” Kidman told the court.

Fawcett is suing The Sun-Herald newspaper for defamation over an article that said he was Sydney's most disliked freelance photographer. Fairfax Media, the newspaper’s publisher, subpoenaed Kidman to appear in court.

In Australia Kidman, who turned 40 this summer, is a national obsession. Some of the photographers there seem to delight in baiting her to the point where it has been speculated that she might turn her back on her homeland for good. “Oh, no way,” she says. “That was one day out of 365.”

Indeed, she has spent much of the past year there filming Australia, Baz Luhrmann’s Second World War romantic epic in which she plays an English aristocrat who falls for a rugged Aussie, played by Hugh Jackman. But after nine months the film is still not finished and Luhrmann, with whom she made one of her best films, Moulin Rouge!, is living up to his reputation as a director who likes to take his time.

“We finish on December 21,” she says. “I hope. For Moulin Rouge! we did everything in the studio but for this we’ve been on location the entire time – in Darwin, up in Queensland and then camping out in tents in the middle of the desert. It’s extraordinary in epicness. This is the kind of film that I dreamt of making as a little girl.”

In the past few years, Kidman’s previously sure touch has, at times, deserted her. She was in a couple of lame remakes – The Stepford Wives, The Invasion (based on Invasion of the Body Snatchers) – and Bewitched, a clunky rehash of the Sixties sitcom. But now she’s back on course – The Golden Compass is a big, splashy blockbuster which should lead to two sequels and, while making Australia, she has simultaneously filmed The Reader for Stephen Daldry.

“I love that man,” she says of Daldry. “He just gets me. I love working with Baz and I love working with Stephen. You have certain people that you consider your creative soul-mates and those two are and basically I would do anything for them."

When both films are completed she wants to take some time off to be with her husband, the country singer Keith Urban. They have been through tough times – Urban checked himself into rehab to tackle an alcohol problem shortly after their wedding in June last year – but now, she insists, they are happy.

“Actually, I’m not that interested in working right now,” Kidman says. “I think that a lot of my wish to work was about wanting to get lost, not wanting to be in the world. I have a reason to be in the world now and that reason is Keith.”

Kidman was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, when her father, Anthony, a clinical psychologist, was working there. After a brief spell in the US when she was a toddler, the family moved back to Sydney. She first acted professionally as a 14-year-old in a family film called Bush Christmas. “I think I earned a thousand dollars for eight weeks’ work and it felt like I was rolling in it.”

At the start of the 1990s, Kidman was gaining a reputation beyond Australia. She met Tom Cruise on Tony Scott’s Days of Thunderand by the time they appeared together in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, Kidman was as big a star as her husband. She has two adopted children with Cruise, Isabella Jane, 14, and Conor, 12, and has said that she hopes to start a family with Urban: “What will be, will be. It’s in God’s hands.”

As well as a home in Australia, they have a ranch in Tennessee, which she says, is her escape. “We just have our own little bubble that we exist in. And I can completely disappear. I’m really good at it and I don’t need much.”

In The Golden Compass she is suit-ably sinister as the icily beautiful Mrs Coulter, who organises the kidnapping of children off the streets of Oxford and sends them away to the mysterious North where they are subjected to horrible experiments. “I hope we get to make the next two because you only get this tiny bit of her background in the first so to see her trajectory would be interesting. What appealed was the chance to explore a character over three films, and that’s very rare.”

Pullman’s book also tackles deeper, philosophical issues about freedom and individuality and casts the Church as the villain of piece. This has drawn criticism: the Catholic League has even called for the film to be boycotted. However, its director Chris Weitz has removed almost all of the religious references – and as for Kidman, “I was raised a strict Catholic and the last thing I want to do is have my grandmother turning in her grave.”

Instead, there are fantastic special effects, with talking bears, surreal landscapes and Zeppelins. For Kidman and the rest this meant a lot of work in front of the CGI green screen. “Green screen is not my favourite thing,” she says. “I became an actor because I wanted to act with other actors. That’s been the beauty of Baz’s film; you are on location breathing the air, feeling the impact of the sunsets. With something like Compassyou have to really use your imagination. It’s a different challenge. But it’s where movies are heading. Australia is the last of a dying breed and this is part of the new wave.”

And with that she pulls the blanket up around her.

— The Golden Compass is released on Dec 5

Nicole Kidman, this is your screen life

To Die For (1995) Kidman won her first Golden Globe for her performance as a ruthlessly ambitious weathergirl who gets some teenagers to kill her husband.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999) Played a wife who admits that she has fantasised about a stranger, setting her husband (Tom Cruise) off on an odyssey of twisted sex.

Moulin Rouge! (2001) Giving her voice an airing in this lavish musical, Kidman plays a courtesan having a tortured affair with a poet (Ewan McGregor).

The Others (2001) In this chilly horror Kidman is the mother of two children who have an allergy to sunlight, which forces them to live in a spooky darkened mansion.

The Hours (2002) Her performance as Virginia Woolf (below) won Kidman an Oscar, a Bafta and her third Golden Globe.

LOUISE COHEN

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