Nicole explores the dark side of love

Marriage is a raw, dangerous adventure according to Nicole Kidman, who told GQ magazine last week that her current union with the country music star Keith Urban was like being out at sea — adding ominously: “You could drown.”

Kidman described herself as a “strange little girl” from Australia who ended up marrying one of the most famous actors in the world. Though reluctant to talk about life as the former Mrs Tom Cruise, she was more expansive about her love life in general, saying: “My life has been about exploring types of love. I’ve explored obsession, I’ve explored loss and love in terms of being in a grief-stricken place. I’ve explored strange sexual fetish stuff, I’ve explored the mundane aspect of marriage and monogamy.”

Kidman and Cruise most famously explored sexuality on screen in the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut, which was panned by critics and included a scene where Cruise’s character is pursued by a group of attackers shouting “faggot”. Contrary to rumour, Kidman insisted the pair were still happily married at that point. “People will always watch the movie and go, ‘Oh no, that must be where it all went wrong’. I don’t want to say whether anything is or isn’t true any more,” she added. The real meltdown, according to director Stephen Daldry, occurred during the making of The Hours when Kidman played a suicidal Virginia Woolf and was suffering from “obvious heartbreak”.

The Hours was one of Kidman’s last commercial successes. She acknowledges she has gained a reputation for avant-garde films that “aren’t everyone’s cup of tea”. She is not an artist “for the masses”.

Now Kidman says she is happy to live with Urban and her baby daughter on a remote farm in Tennessee and raise chickens. She may have put the past behind her, but she has destroyed her diaries — just in case. “If you know what is going on inside someone’s head all the time, that is not a good place,” Kidman said. “You can’t read somebody’s diary, you shouldn’t read it. I burnt most of my journals after I remarried ... You’re only going to find out bad things.”

The fine art of netting a toy boy

She has survived cancer twice and been nominated for the Turner prize. Now the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, 42, has directed her first feature film, Nowhere Boy, about the early life of John Lennon, and has acquired the leading man, 19-year-old Aaron Johnson, as her fiancé. “I’ve never lived my life in a straightforward way, so why start now?” Taylor-Wood told Vogue. “If you start to fear what other people think, you don’t live your life to the fullest capacity.”

Despite a 23-year age gap, Taylor-Wood denied that she is part of the “cougar” trend of older women dating teenage boys: “Maybe people will see a beautiful love story coming out of the film.” She added that although she once said she wanted to get into bed with Elvis, “now I totally fancy John Lennon”.

Only joking, says comic under fire

Have you heard the one about the stand-up, the tasteless joke and the subsequent hot water? The comedian Jimmy Carr described the controversy over a gag in his live show about amputee soldiers as “genuinely stressing”.

He had told an audience in Manchester: “Say what you like about servicemen amputees, but we’re going to have a f****** good Paralympic team in 2012.”

In an interview with The Guardian he said that he thought the joke was “totally acceptable” and was horrified to learn that radio stations had been ringing up the families of injured servicemen to read it to them over the phone. Carr insisted that he was an “über-liberal” whose only intention was to make people laugh. “I’m sorry if anyone was offended,” he said.

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