Nicole uncovered

People who knew Nicole Kidman in the 1980s, when she was a young actress making films in her native Australia, always liked her and her honesty. If she was in love, she was loyal. If she was working, she was dedicated. She was modest, reasonable and lively. She was also cultivating an American career with the dedication of an Olympic athlete. "There was an ambition, deeply innate," remembers a friend, "and I thought that because she was so young, it had to burn out. But it didn't. It became fiercer."

From about the age of 20 onward, she made exploratory trips to Los Angeles. She managed to get the respected agent Sam Cohn to take her on. Warren Beatty met her and worked hard to woo her - with some film project being dangled. Beatty was then on good terms with the writer Robert Towne, and Towne had lately met Tom Cruise.

Men in Hollywood take it for granted with each other that they are all keeping their eyes open for the new girl. It is like following sport, demonstrating you are switched on in a business that would feel lost if it didn't have every year another dozen or so young women to "introduce".

Towne had been brought in to punch up the dialogue in Days of Thunder, Cruise's new film. He proposed Kidman for the female role. Very soon, the three had lunch. "It was clear," says Towne, "that Tom was smitten straight away. It happens."

Kidman says that from the moment they met, they shared that feeling of having known each other already. They are left-handers, high-school dropouts. And they started laughing: he likes to make people laugh, he loves to use his grin, and she is never happier than when laughing. Years later, Nicole admitted to Vanity Fair magazine: "I was consumed by it, willingly. And I was desperate to have a baby with him. I didn't care if we were married."

Their reactions to the love affair were intriguingly different. Kidman had lived a little and she adjusted to her devoted boyfriend, an actor in Australia, by missing many of his phone calls. Cruise was still married to Mimi Rogers.

In January 1990, he started divorce proceedings. Not even a scientologist marriage counsellor could help. A month later, he sent his plane to Australia to bring Nicole's mother to the USA so she could inspect her daughter's new love. (If she doesn't like the guy, look at the plane.) At first, everyone saw Kidman's love affair with Cruise in terms of a big star picking up a newcomer. What nobody seemed to notice was that the "kid", the girl, was not just a few inches taller than the guy. She was, in so many ways, more settled, more secure, stronger. The novice from Sydney had made 18 pictures already - for film and television. He had done 12. Of course, he had an Oscar nomination (for Born on the Fourth of July); he had generated huge monies at the box office; and he was internationally known. Still, nobody really saw at first that maybe the guy, the star, needed rescuing.

In the autumn of 1990, Kidman started work on the film of Billy Bathgate, EL Doctorow's story of the gangster Dutch Schultz as seen through the eyes of a kid, Billy Bathgate, who is hired to take care of Schultz's mistress, Mrs Preston, while he is negotiating murder charges. Kidman played Mrs Preston, a blasé, reckless society woman who gets a thrill out of the underworld and who finds bigger excitement in seducing Billy Bathgate under Schultz's nose. Kidman needed only two seconds on screen to be the dazzling, briefly naked flaunter of her own sexuality. Robert Benton, the writer-director, was amazed that this apparent beginner had such authority. "It is not a thing you can teach. She had it."

So many American actresses might have been more coy. And quite plainly, the public saw what Nicole was: a sexy beanpole, with gingery pubic hair, commas of breast and boyish hips. This was not a goddess. But she carried herself nude with an ease - more than that, a pleasure - that was so much more erotic than far greater bodies in erotic poses. Mrs Preston was made for sex, and in that advertisement a similar claim was being slipped out to the world on behalf of the actress playing her. Cruise, apparently, came to the set for those scenes, and many felt that he was guarding his treasure.

And so in Telluride, Colorado, on Christmas Eve 1990, they were married, wearing blue jeans and bare feet. The music was Van Morrison singing Someone Like You. Tom owned private planes, yet he was living the emotional life of a boy, still. Anyone who could understand Mrs Preston's sophistication knows Kidman was a good deal farther on in the world, far enough ahead to be alarming. She says now that she swore she would never "get married. Live with someone. Have kids. I considered getting married but not living with the person. I actually posed that possibility to a guy I was going to get engaged to, and he said, 'I'm not calling up my wife for a date.'

"I come from a family where my parents are together, but I really believed that marriage couldn't last. So, I thought, either don't do it, or, if you do it for fun, make sure you don't get trapped. I was going to be like my idol Katharine Hepburn, who said you couldn't have a career and a marriage. Then I thought, 'F*** it, I'm going to be happy'".

In every interview Cruise did back then, he was guarded, giving away little. But in her interviews, Kidman was flirty, provocative. Despite her self-awareness about competing with Tom's status, she seemed to want the world to feel the flame burning inside her. Just as she was smart enough to look at him and see the closed-off, young rock he wanted to be, surely he could feel the flirt in her.

Late in 1992, when Kidman was 25, the story broke that they were seeking to adopt a child. Kidman said it was "pretty spontaneous... the opportunity just came up".

Isabella Jane Kidman Cruise was adopted in early January 1993. Kidman said that she had always preferred the idea of adoption to getting pregnant. Cruise was over the moon. Indeed, it was noted that he was suddenly more generous with his words and time, and more open in his feelings.

But then in the March 1993 issue of Playboy, Mimi Rogers posed for nude pictures and delivered a sensational interview, saying the essential reason for the end of their marriage had been Tom's thinking of becoming a monk. "He thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument." In time, Rogers said she was only joking. Kidman did all she could to help blow away any rumours. She told Movieline: "He's the best lover I ever had," and when the insinuation was pursued, she said: "That he's gay? Really? Well, ummm, he's not gay in my knowledge. You'll have to ask him that question."

Then McCall's magazine chipped in, with a piece that alleged the marriage between Tom and Nicole had been arranged by his people to help secure his romantic image and that her movie career (or a shot at one) was part of the deal. These allegations were without substance and McCall's quickly agreed to run an apology and a retraction. I don't think there's a word of truth in it, just as I don't think Kidman had the duplicity to accept such an arrangement any more than she would have been prepared to be ordered around by her husband's scientologist advisers.

By 1995, they had two adopted children, and of course they were happy, though it was by now notable that Kidman had also begun to share Cruise's taste for an entourage of assistants who could help look after the children and lighten her load so that she could continue her career. And that was not going too well. In Tom, she could observe (and learn from) an actor who set up his parts well in advance, with a lot of money coming his way and a lot of control. To hear him talk about himself, his career was hitting every planned, positive target. Meanwhile, Nicole could only list pictures that she wanted but never got: Thelma & Louise (1991), in the Geena Davis part; The Silence of the Lambs (1991), missing out to Jodie Foster; Sleepless in Seattle (1993), the making of Meg Ryan; Mary Reilly (1996), for which Julia Roberts took a critical beating in maybe her best acting job; and Ghost (1990), which went to Demi Moore.

"Tom's girl" had had to go elsewhere: to Far and Away, nearly an object of derision; Malice - the sort of picture that needs a pretty girl who will be cute and take off her clothes for about $200,000; My Life - a film with Michael Keaton and a flop; and Batman Forever, where she played a shrink for $250,000. It was bimbo money, and she knew that bimbos got four or five years in pictures. Demi Moore was set to get $12m for Striptease, to be made in 1996 - the best money an American actress had ever had in Hollywood. Kidman was never considered for it because she didn't have the breasts. ()

And then came the turning point: To Die For, the black comedy in which she played a homicidal television weather girl.

"Suddenly I had something," she says. "The earlier parts that I'd had in America, so many were lame. But now, I thought, 'I can say these words.' I didn't change a line... The sexuality was something I had never had a chance to do. And I relished the darkness of it all. It felt like being set free to play."



To Die For altered most people's ideas of Kidman as an actress and as a force that might generate and sustain whole movies. The best thing about the film is the direct-to-camera narration that Kidman's character gives - uninfected by the immorality of what she has done - spinning the story to her own best ends. There could not be a better model for the way in which vanity and self-love have obliterated critical thinking.

Nicole had difficulty with these scenes, and the difficulty is close to her engine as an actress. "I battle with being shy," she tells me. "I have lots of ideas - many more than I actually give in a film. And shyness embarrasses me. I've never given a performance I think is really good. It's why I can blush on camera - because I am embarrassed, because I've blown it. Perfection never comes.

"I like scenes I've done. I liked Moulin Rouge!. Stuff in The Others, The Hours. Never the whole thing. I'm hopeless, watching my films. I don't see them any more. I feel literally nauseous. I can never see a rough cut. Kubrick made me watch playbacks on Eyes Wide Shut. But that's all."

As they worked on the script of Eyes Wide Shut in 1995, the director, Stanley Kubrick, and writer, Frederic Raphael, discussed casting Cruise and Kidman. Kubrick invited them to his secluded house, near St Albans, in Hertfordshire. Did they understand that it was to be a film about a couple split apart by suspicion, jealousy and the power of fantasy - or that Kubrick may be setting a trap for them? The original novella by Arthur Schnitzler - Traumnovelle, published in 1926 - concerns a young couple with a daughter, a nice apartment and a happy marriage, apparently, but with dreams in which each is unfaithful to the other.

Cruise and Kidman moved to England with their children; they wanted to indicate their commitment. Neither had acted in so prestigious a project before, or for a director so secure in the pantheon. They rented a house by Regent's Park, as well as a smaller house in Hertfordshire. They had their children with them, and there were holidays to the Lake District. It was during their London residence, on September 6, 1997, that they attended the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. Nicole had had an odd rapport with Diana. A friend observes: "If Diana had had as much instinct for power as Nicole has in her little finger, she'd have been queen of England."

Shooting began at Pinewood Studios in November 1996 and would be drawn out over a period of two years. Many scenes were taken over and over again - a method Kubrick had often employed before, but which dismayed and exhausted Cruise and Kidman, especially when they had no clear instruction on what to change in their performance.

Together, the extended schedule and the natural blood lust of the British press towards celebrities promoted unsubstantiated rumours that Cruise and Kidman required some psychological and sexual education to do their work. The couple successfully sued the Star in relation to these allegations.

At this point, the intricacy with which real intimacy was being manipulated or exploited becomes complex. Nobody could propose that Kubrick (an inveterate gossip) was unaware of the rumours that Cruise was gay. Which makes it more notable that he had a scene where Cruise's character, Bill, is buffeted and harassed by a gang of toughs who call him "Faggot!".

A director is an interloper if he is male and his actress is married. He says, I have to talk to you privately, intimately, because I have to talk to you about the way your desires - your desires, Nicole - may merge with and give body to your character. Alas, this has to be done away from your husband. It must be just the two of us. Oh, Tom, I must take Nicole away to somewhere private. This afternoon.

Kidman says: "At certain times (Kubrick) was very controlling but at other times not; he allowed me to just get lost in Alice, and after a year and a half, I just became that woman, in a weird way. I know that sounds ridiculous, but as an actor there is reality and there is pretend, and those lines get crossed, and you're working with a director who allows that to happen. It's exciting and dangerous - that's when the work becomes so much more than just making a film."

A nude scene was part of her contract for the film. Alice admits to Bill - though it is done in the manner of a tormenting boast - that once in a hotel lobby she had a brief glimpse of a naval officer and would have given herself to him then and there, on the spot. Kubrick's organisation found a young Canadian actor and model, Gary Goba, to play the naval officer. In December 1997, he got a call: would he do a sex scene with Nicole Kidman? Goba never saw a script. He was told he would have nothing to say. He should simply do as he was told. It would take a few days. He agreed. He was driven to Pinewood, and there were Tom and Nicole to meet him.

Goba remembers: "She stood there and chatted with me on the stairs, heading up to make-up, for maybe two minutes or so. She was super-sweet, really, really nice and relaxed, and said, 'Hi, pleasure to meet you, and I'm looking forward to working with you.'"

Their set was a hotel room. Kubrick told Goba that Kidman would be lying on her back and he was to come in on top of her. "Let's get right to it," he said.

The two players took off their robes. They were stark naked. Goba noticed how beautiful she was. Then Nicole asked for a closed set. Kubrick would operate the camera himself. It was just the three of them.

It lasted six days.

Many situations were shot that do not figure in the film. There was a scene in a bath, for instance. There was also a scene in which he administered cunnilingus to her, in some detail, for which she wore a pubic wig. The restraint of the film-making process, its etiquette, is wondrous. I do not mean to suggest that the scene is gratuitous or unnecessary. It is an important part of the arc of the film. Not that it had to be as graphic as it is. Not that it is easy to see why six days were needed to get it all done.

The black-and-white scenes are erotic, I suppose, but it is notable how far they are to be read as Alice's dream or rapture. Alice is in sprawling delight, lending herself to every silent ingredient of the acts that equals pleasure.

Cruise has no such scene in the film, even though his character carries the great load of the story. In all his adventures, Bill is belittled. Nearly every woman he meets is taller than he is. And he is for much of the time dressed in a dark overcoat that falls below his knees, which has the effect of making him seem more diminutive than normal. Bill is steadily tempted without being satisfied, however often he is humiliated. He fails to have the kind of sexual vitality he imagines Alice enjoying. He is called "faggot"; he is clearly perceived as gay by a hotel clerk. He is intimidated, menaced and denied - and he takes it all, while looking as resolutely boyish as Tom Cruise.

Eyes Wide Shut ends with huge uncertainty and the feeling of a psychic load not quite delivered. It's as if the divorce between the leading players is the ending it needs. I think Kubrick made a film that whispered to Kidman: you are a real actor, a sexual phenomenon - and he is not. Nobody can see the film without inhabiting that dismay. So why should the two central players not feel it themselves? On March 1, 1999, Cruise and Kidman saw Eyes Wide Shut for the first time in a Manhattan screening room. They watched it through twice. "It was my obsession," says Nicole later, "our obsession, for two or three years." But obsessions are hard to share, and even if Cruise and Kidman were making the same film, they were instruments in Kubrick's vision.

Kidman (who had lost her voice temporarily) never actually spoke to Kubrick about the film. She faxed him. He called back with a message; he wanted to talk to her. But he died, on March 7, before she could return that call. So whatever private relationship there has been between actress and director - and there is, always - there was no resolution in this case, no thank you, let alone an attempt to discuss what the film means. For Cruise and Kidman, it was simply dropped in their lap. Less than a year later, they would be in the process of divorcing.

A possible portrait of a marriage in the world of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman is...? Well, no, it's not Eyes Wide Shut. On reflection, I'd say it might be The Hours, the portrayal of Virginia Woolf for which Kidman won an Oscar in 2002. Not that that union, between Leonard and Virginia, is entirely blissful. But still, as she walks off to her death in the River Ouse, Virginia has just written a letter to Leonard and left it sealed in a blue envelope on the mantelpiece. In it, she says she doubts that any two people could have been happier. It's just that so much of her being or her energy is caught up in the tormenting matter of being alone that waits to deliver a book like Mrs Dalloway. In that unremitting crisis, marriage may be incidental.

There are people who, when asked what Cruise and Kidman had, or have, in common, reply: well, the same sort of driving ambition to do good work. All that that means is that the marriage is never the big thing, or the inner thing.


© David Thomson 2006

Extracted from Nicole Kidman by David Thomson, published by Bloomsbury on Sept 18 at £18.99.

Copies can be ordered for £16.99 (inc p&p) from The Sunday Times Books First on 0870 165 8585