Nicole Kidman, who is 37, is a fine actress and a delight to look at. She has at least 1.5 million strikes on Google to her name, and is having a retrospective at the NFT which opens this week. In terms of status and achievement, this can hardly be beaten. We will be able to view a selection of “her” films (that is to say she acted in them, forget writers, directors and so on).
The work will include The Hours, gentle and mournful, The Others, quiet and spooky, the noisy and naffly pronounced Moulin Rouge, and the alarmingly masochistic Dogville. Less successful films, ones which failed at the box office — Billy Bathgate, The Human Stain, The Peacemaker — will be tactfully omitted. The tact seems to me unnecessary — ever since watching her as a murderous TV weather forecaster in To Die For (1995) I have been happy to see her and her ever-changing personality in practically anything at all. And personally I loved Billy Bathgate, with its Tom Stoppard screenplay from an E. L. Doctorow novel: very literary.
But famous as she is, an A-list celebrity plus, her gowns and her love affairs and her good behaviour under stress all over the papers, I would hesitate to call Kidman a film star. Where’s the mystery? We know too much. She’s not voluptuous and feminine, she’s skinny and goes to the gym. Her tiny arms are overmuscled.
The sorry fact is that film stars, screen goddesses and screen legends were a product of the mid-20th-century and we are now in the 21st. Kidman “stars in films” all right — the verb works these days but not the noun. She’s too clever, too much of an actress, she fits herself to suit the part, like some kind of chameleon. The real stars were not chameleons: they came in black and white.
Alejandro Amenábar, who wrote and directed The Others, seemed to have some idea of the connection between stardom and black and white. The screen was bleached of colour. Kidman lived in a light-sensitive, haunted world in which everything had to be darkened. At the premiere she wore a black dress and her skin was white, white, white. But she still fails to become a star from the black-and-white era.
She’s a role model, that’s the trouble. She works too hard and behaves too well. The words “role model” had not even been invented 50 years back. Film stars were meant to behave badly, and live excessively, look great, despise everyone and perform well at the box office. Right through to the Sixties, if the heroine behaved badly on the screen — slept with someone else’s husband or stole money — they would be sure to die in the last reel.
It was oddly reassuring. Their coiffure was always perfect: Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward could fight it out for Gregory Peck in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and neither would end up with a hair out of place: Katharine Hepburn, alone on The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart, would have an endless supply of clean, tailored shirts. The stars stayed themselves, immaculate: plots and sets had to do the changing. None of this Actor’s Studio stuff. Today’s film actresses are trained to live their parts. If her hair needs mussing for Cold Mountain, Kidman will muss it. If Renée Zellweger needs to have a weight problem in Bridget Jones, she’ll eat. They choose their own scripts, instead of doing what the studio puts in front of them, and if they get it wrong they get blamed. They prefer to be called actors, not actresses, which doesn’t help.
So Kidman gains great respect but not Hall of Fame status. We’re no longer in the days when to be truly beautiful was so rare that people gaped, and this too is her misfortune. What’s so special now? Pretty girls in the black and white days were few and far between. Now they are everywhere, thanks to orthodontics, cosmetic surgery, gym workouts, and bee-stung lips.
US orthodontics, by the way, has a lot to answer for. European beauties smile by turning the edges of their mouths upwards: their teeth may have very little to do with the ones they were born with but at least they are small. In Hollywood they smile by lowering their bottom jaw. Their teeth are so large and perfect they have no choice. When Julia Roberts smiles we certainly know it. Doris Day smiled a lot too, but for this reason never quite became a screen legend. It takes mystery to be a Goddess, best if you want to be alone, like Garbo. To be fair, Roberts has mystery. She tries to keep herself private. You can believe she is capable of love. She adds up to more than the sum of her parts. That’s pretty legendary.
The great film stars of the past came before the days of therapy. They emoted unreasonably: they did not seek closure, they did not know why they felt; they just felt. They adored men (unless they were trying to murder them): they did not see love as neurotic dependency. They believed in it.
Today’s film actresses weep with gratitude when they get Oscars: yesterday’s stars would not have dreamt of being grateful. Would a timorous tear have come to Bette Davis’s slightly bulbous eyes when she accepted her Oscar for Jezebel in 1938? I doubt it. She’d just have assumed that she deserved it. Four years ago Steven Spielberg bought that particular Oscar for $520,000. Will Kidman’s Oscar for The Hours be so coveted 60 or so years on? I wouldn’t bet on it. Susan Sarandon’s best actress award for Dead Man Walking might fetch a few hundred thousand. Its political heart was in the right place and she was just so astonishingly beautiful in the 1987 Witches of Eastwick, a memento of her would be really good on a mogul’s mantelpiece. Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Chicago in 2002, has star quality, though I can’t put my finger on why. Other than that she’s wilful, obstinate and embarks on lawsuits she would be wiser not to, and is dreadfully upset when someone publishes a photo of her eating her own wedding cake.
But if I want to see Chicago I just have to order a DVD on the internet. The very accessibility of the film, of the actress, spoils the impact. Screen Goddesses and Legends flourished in the days when a film would have to travel from town to town, staying a week at most in any one cinema, before the precious reels left town. If you missed a film, that was that. No TV recording, no video, no DVD. When, aged 13, I left New Zealand for London, I was almost as sorry to miss the forthcoming attraction at the Regal, Veronica Lake in I Married a Witch, as I was to leave father and friends behind. Lake was a screen legend, she had a curtain of blonde hair that fell over her face. I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and I had missed her. Technology moved on and now I can see I Married a Witch any time I choose, just by calling it up. It turns out to be a not very good film. Once it was enough just that it was there; it didn’ t have to be good.
Something’s lost. Lauren Bacall, four decades older than Kidman but clocking up a mere quarter of her Google rating, lately snapped at a journalist at the Venice Film Festival that Kidman wasn’t a screen legend, she was too young, just a beginner. The remark flew round the world, interpreted as Bacall dissing her younger rival — they had just co-starred in Birth, which was received at Venice with hisses and boos. Bacall may well have been in a bad mood, but she was right. Kidman, at 37, belongs too much to now to be a screen legend. Legends relate to the past. Bacall is certainly a legend: she may be alive and working, but she remains in our minds in her glory days, 19 years old, in black and white, in To Have and Have Not. Bacall, suggesting to Bogart in the face of all convention that if he whistled she’d come, had more erotic impact than anything Kidman is allowed to achieve, crawling round and raped in full colour, as the script dictates in Dogville. A scene which, actually, most of us would far rather forget.
