Nicole Kidman does not have an awards cabinet. Unlike other Hollywood stars. Nor does she keep her statuettes somewhere ironic, like the downstairs loo, or use them in a nonchalant fashion as a doorstopper. Instead, she gives them away.
When she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film, The Hours, Kidman gave the Oscar to her mother, Janelle, a former nursing instructor and self-avowed feminist who had raised her daughter to believe in gender equality and the art of the possible.
‘That’s a big thing when you have a mother who has helped shape you and probably didn’t have the career she deserved,’ Kidman says. ‘So in some ways that’s my way of going, “Look Mama, look! This is yours too.”’
When she scooped a clutch of Emmys and Golden Globes for her performance as Celeste, a wife trapped in a toxic relationship, in HBO’s hit mini-series Big Little Lies(which she also co-produced), Kidman gave them to her two youngest daughters, Sunday, nine, and Faith, seven. It didn’t quite go according to plan, however.
‘I said to my oldest: “You can put this on your shelf,’ and she said, “No, my shelf is full, I don’t want that.’” Kidman laughs. ‘Her shelf is full of snow globes and certificates and books, you know, bits and pieces and knick-knacks. I totally get it. You don’t want some trophy your mum’s won sitting up there. The little one was like...’ – and here, Kidman assumes the high-pitched voice of a child determined to have an ice-cream – “‘I WANT IT!’”
Kidman was delighted by her daughters’ strong-willed responses. Having spent the best part of three decades in a notoriously fickle industry, she knows better than most not to take things personally.
Born in Hawaii but raised in Sydney, she had parts in Australian films as a teenager before her breakthrough role came in the 1989 psychological thriller Dead Calm.
Since then, Kidman has made a career out of defying genres, taking on big-budget popcorn-munching fodder alongside indie hits and challenging auteur-driven pieces. She has played everything, from a homicidally ambitious weather girl in the 1995 cult classic To Die For to a doomed courtesan in Baz Luhrmann’s splashy 2001 Moulin Rouge! to a small-town outsider in Danish experimental director Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003).
There have been downs as well as ups. For a time in her 40s, she wasn’t getting the roles that she wanted and her first marriage, to megastar actor Tom Cruise, with whom she adopted two children, ended in divorce in 2001. Five years later, she tied the knot with country singer Keith Urban. The couple live in Nashville with their two young daughters. ‘You know, my life has taken sharp turns at times that I never expected,’ Kidman acknowledges.
She says that often the surprises have proven to be the best bits and that she has learned to accept all that life throws at her. This makes her a calm and somehow reassuring person to talk to – like a particularly wise village elder who knows exactly which herbs to grind to make fever-relieving poultices.
In person, she has an overwhelming physical impact: tall and pale and seemingly possessed of age-defying beauty. About to turn 51, she’s at the top of her professional game too. Last year she secured another Best Actress nomination at the Oscars for her role as an adoptive mother in the weepy epic Lion and garnered much critical acclaim for her part in Jane Campion’s TV series, Top of the Lake.
‘Yeah, 50 was a good year,’ Kidman says. ‘I never thought that year would have brought so many...’ – she searches for the right word – ‘triumphs, I suppose.’
What does she attribute it to?
‘Actually it was just serendipity and a confluence of events… The one thing that did change is that both my kids were in school, and I was able to focus on my own life a little bit more, just because, you know, I’d got them through those pre-school years when you’re barely hanging on [and] it’s hard to get out of the sweatpants.’
These days, her work-life balance is more in check. When we speak, she’s filming Season Two of Big Little Lies alongside Reese Witherspoon and Meryl Streep, and her daughters are with her. ‘Meryl Streep is a godsend,’ Kidman says, fan-girling. ‘She’s on set and it’s jaw-dropping.’ The first series of Big Little Lies was, in many ways, a watershed moment – and not just for Kidman, who was a revelation in her role as an abused woman struggling to fall out of love with her abuser, but for the rest of us who were watching too.
The show features several female leads, each of them flawed and at times unlikeable, ultimately rallying together despite their differences. It is produced by women and the original book was written by a woman too – author Liane Moriarty. It felt as if we were desperately thirsty for a show that demonstrated the power of female solidarity on both sides of the camera, and when it dropped, seven million viewers drank each episode in like a cool glass of water.
Playing Celeste clearly took a lot out of her. Why does Kidman think it resonated so deeply? ‘God, I mean, we’re still slightly baffled,’ she says with a frankness that I will come to realise is typical Kidman. ‘But I think the show itself was entertaining, and the women involved are so funny and so good at what they do... and then you put in the topical nature of Celeste’s story-line, and all those things just seem to connect with people.’
The role of Celeste, who has an outwardly perfect life that masks the extent of her husband’s abuse, took Kidman to some dark places. ‘You have to delve into parts where you go, “OK, what’s the truth of this character?”’ she says. “We had to be really honest... You’re playing love, but you’re playing love that is so da-maging to each of the people. I would come home and cry after doing Big Little Lies. I would cry alone. I would sit and I would have a bath and cry. And feel very distressed and not know exactly what to do about it.’
I ask Kidman if she has ever experienced a toxic relationship similar to the one she portrayed on screen and for the first time she sounds flustered. She stops and begins again. ‘Listen, my art – I don’t really see it about me... I see it as a conduit for a spectrum of ideas, so, you know, that’s way too personal.’
‘Artistically, I work from emotion,’ says Kidman, which, she admits, is not always a good thing. Her mother called her an ‘intense’ child, and it seems as if that intensity has never quite left her. How does she cope with that level of emotional engagement? ‘I’ve got a good husband who is really, really good to talk to,’ Kidman says. ‘He’s artistic, so he gets it. I’m not coming home to someone who just doesn’t understand. And he’s a good buffer.’
Besides, there’s no better way of getting over a tough day than walking through the door and being brought back to earth by the demands of your family. ‘I have two little girls that are standing there while I’m thinking, “Oh my God, I feel like I can’t even go on.” And then they’re asking, “Errrr, what’s for breakfast?’” She laughs. ‘That is a gift for me because that means you’re thinking, “OK, get it together.” Even just pretend you’ve got it together, but get it together.”’
Becoming a mother was not an easy road for Kidman. Growing up as the eldest of two daughters, she always felt the urge to look after her younger sister, Antonia. Her father Antony, who was an eminent biochemist and clinical psychologist, died suddenly of a heart attack in 2014, leaving Kidman ‘shattered’. Her mother was ‘provocative but compassionate’ and an active feminist campaigner who used to take her young daughters to protest meetings (one of Kidman’s earliest memories is sitting at the back of [a room, aged four, watching her mother talk to the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Sydney). ‘I like that feeling of taking care of someone,’ Kidman says. ‘Probably my younger sister is, like, “Ugh, yeah, you were too much of a mother, and still are. Don’t tell me what to do...” [but] I like to do it on a set with younger actors. I have an enormous desire to mother people.’
Years later, when Kidman was married to Cruise, she suffered an ectopic pregnancy and a miscarriage. At the time, she was told it was highly unlikely she would ever conceive and the couple adopted two children – Isabella
and Connor, who are now both in their 20s. Her separation from Cruise and her current relationship with her older, adopted children is not something she talks about specifically – there have been reports of estrangement, which the children deny. But she does say society is too hung up on the notion of biological motherhood.‘I mean – whatever, right? Whether you’re an adoptive mother, whether you’re a foster mother, whether you’re a biological mother
– it’s the emotion of attaching to a child and helping to guide them and rear them [that is important].’
When I tell her I also went through a divorce and also experienced issues with fertility, she is immediately empathetic. ‘And you were shattered?’ she asks, as if she knows only too well what that’s like. ‘And what are you? You’re 39?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Yeah. You’ll have a baby if you want to. Do you want to?’
‘Yes,’ I say, again, this time more forcefully.‘Well, then. That want is a huge part, I think, of how you find it... But I know the yearning. That yearning. It’s a huge, aching yearning. And the loss! The loss of a miscarriage is not talked about enough. That’s massive grief to certain women. There’s an enormous amount of pain and an enormous amount of joy on the other side of it. The flipside of going through so much yearning and pain to get there is the feeling of ‘“Ahhhh!” when you have the child.’
It was just over a year after her divorce was finalised that Kidman won her Oscar for The Hours. But afterwards, back in her hotel room, it didn’t feel as good as she expected it to. Surrounded by the trappings of success, wearing a designer gown, clutching that gold statuette that should have symbolised so much, Kidman felt more alone than ever. She asked herself, ‘OK, what am I actually doing? Where do I go from here? What do I do? I’m divorced, I’m on my own, what’s next?’
She began to nurture a vision of a different kind of future. She decided she would buy herself a farm in Oregon, live there on her own and perhaps have a baby as a single mother ‘and then,’ she says simply, ‘along came Keith.’
The couple met in 2005, at an event in Los Angeles honouring Australians in America and, Kidman says, her future shifted in that instant: ‘Oregon became Nashville [where Urban lived]. Suddenly I’m thinking, “Well, Nashville is rural...”
They moved to a farm for the first year of their marriage, and it was there that Kidman discovered she was pregnant at the age of 40. ‘It was a miracle because I’d not thought I’d be able to have [a baby] in my lifetime,’ she says now. ‘I’d had a lot of complications, and I don’t mind speaking about it because I think it takes the onus off it [for other women].
‘They told me I was probably not going to be able to have a child, a birth child. It was, “OK, that’s it.” And then, out of blue...’ She breaks off. ‘And that was Sunday. Sunday Rose appeared. So that’s a very, very powerful thing to happen.’ Two years later, in 2010, the couple had their second child, Faith, via a surrogate.
Motherhood has been a transformative experience for Kidman. She worries about ageing now, not because of how she looks, but because ‘I want to stay healthy and vibrant, I want to be able to take care of them... That’s a big part of it when you have children when you’re older.’
Kidman is less concerned with her physical appearance. In Top of the Lake her character had a full head of grey hair and a face denuded of make-up. She has just filmed The Destroyer, a crime thriller released later this year, for which she was required to wear a faceload of prosthetics to make her look ‘like a really ravaged cop’.
It doesn’t particularly bother her: ‘My own physical identity should not be a stamp on characters. And it goes both ways. If I’m meant to look younger and better than I am, then you have to do the work for that. But however I’m meant to look is how I’m meant to look.’
In fact, at home, her daughters are forever encouraging her to make more of an effort. ‘You have an almost-10-year-old and a seven-year-old – I mean, that’s hard truth right there. They’ll say, “You’re 50?!” She assumes a tone of childish disbelief. ‘But it’s interesting, because particularly my little one will say: “Please don’t wear your workout stuff to the school this morning. Please blowdry your hair. Please wear some make-up.” I did show up one morning looking like a wreck, I suppose... and my daughter was mortified.’
It’s an interesting time for women, given the post-Weinstein reckoning, the rise of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. As someone who categorically calls herself a feminist, I wonder if Kidman is consciously raising her daughters to be feminists too? ‘Of course. But I’m also raising them to be them.’
When I ask whether the current spate of awareness surrounding sexual assault will lead to lasting change, she says: ‘I don’t know. I feel the need to stay open and engaged and aware and active. But I don’t have a crystal ball.’ Does she feel more radicalised the older she gets? ‘It depends how you define feminism. What is feminism? Equality? Is that what we’re talking about? So radicalised in terms of equality? Not at all. I’ve always believed in equality. What am I willing to do to help achieve it? I’m willing to put myself on the line – with work and speaking out about it. I’m willing to do what’s needed to help.
‘My mother comes from a particular generation, where women probably didn’t have anywhere near the opportunities we get. But there still isn’t equality. And that’s what we need. I don’t think it’s too much to ask. Kids say, “Whoa, there’s so much that’s been achieved.” Yes. But if you actually look at the statistics, it’s really not 50–50.’ She pauses. ‘Right?’ she asks, as if she genuinely wants to hear my point of view.
She is right, of course, and doesn’t need me to say so. But it’s a telling moment – it brings home just how much she values and respects other women. It’s not simply in the roles she chooses or because she’s the mother of young girls, or because she was raised a feminist. It’s something at once less tangible and more meaningful. It’s the sense that, with every story she chooses to tell on screen and the parts of her life she’s willing to share, Kidman truly cares about the real stuff.
That is why those golden statuettes will always be less important to her than her daughter’s snow globes.
Read the full interview in the July issue out now