BIG LITTLE RISE
THE DEVOTED MOTHER AND ACTRESS IS 50 AND ENJOYING A CAREER HIGH
Nicole’s on top of her game
It’s not like Nicole Kidman had anything to prove. She’s one of the best paid movie stars in the world for good reason and has an Oscar on her shelf to show just how highly her work is regarded.
But her recent move into TV has shown that it’s not just the silver screen where she shines and now she’s the favourite to take home an Emmy for her performance in the hit mini-series Big Little Lies.
“She’s become cool again without ever seeking it out,” says director John Cameron Mitchell, who worked with the Australian actress on the 2010 film Rabbit Hole.
Although her career has never tanked, she has made some movies since winning her Best Actress Oscar for The Hours in 2002 that didn’t exactly take the world by storm, such as the 2014 biopic Grace of Monaco, in which she played the title role.
But in the couple of years leading up to her recently celebrated 50th birthday, she began knocking the critics dead with her performances in films like Lion, for which she earned an Academy Award nomination, and on the West End stage as a scientist who helps to uncover the mysteries of DNA in Photograph 51.
Her role as a lawyer-turned-housewife in Big Little Lies was an added reminder of why she is so acclaimed in the acting industry. “Nicole Kidman belongs in the pantheon of great actresses,” wrote the Washington Post’s TV critic, while the Huffington Post says she “delivered a careerdefining performance”.
Nicole takes the praise in her long-legged stride. “I’ve had such a weird, windy, twisty road with [my career],” she says. “So this year has been where people have kind of decided to discover things and support me, but other times they haven’t.”
Interestingly, the meaty roles she’s been able to get her teeth into of late have more often than not been playing mothers. She was a mum of twins in Big Little Lies, the adoptive mother of an Indian son looking for his birth family in Lion and plays a feminist matriarch in the second season of Jane Campion’s mystery series Top of the Lake: China Girl.
Nicole is a mum of four herself. Isabella (24) and
Connor (22) were adopted with her first husband Tom Cruise, and she has Sunday (9) and six-year-old Faith (born via surrogate) with second husband Keith Urban (49). Playing a devoted parent is no stretch, she admits.
“The strongest force I can find within me, right now, is the maternal force. Romantically, I am obviously incredibly awake and alive. I have a really, really strong, good marriage. But maternal love brings you to your knees. It’s surfacing in pretty much everything I do.”
In Top of the Lake, her character has a tricky relationship with her adopted daughter and the plot also touches on surrogacy.
“Jane said, ‘Would this be a difficult place for you to go in terms of what the theme of this is?’ And I said, ‘No, because my story seemed very different.’ Mine was agreed upon and it was a beautiful thing that a woman chose to give us. It was an incredible gift she made.”
After a miscarriage, an ectopic pregnancy and failed fertility treatments, Nicole had come to the conclusion that she would never have a biological child.
“I just went okay, I’ve adopted two children and I’m never going to have a birth child, that’s gonna be my path. I had to come to terms with that. That was part of the thing when I married Keith – ‘I probably can’t have a child, I hope you’re okay with that.’ And he was.
“Then, suddenly, I got pregnant, against all odds. Really against all odds. Doctors were shocked.”
Nicole retreated to the farm she and Kiwi country music star Keith own near Nashville, Tennessee, while she was pregnant with Sunday because
she was scared of losing the baby. She rang her doctor every week fretting. “He’d come by and let me see her [via scan]. I needed to be told, ‘No, it’s okay.’”
She doesn’t talk very much about Connor and Isabella, known as Bella, who chose to stay with their father Tom after he and Nicole split up in 2001.
In the past year, both children have spoken about their mother, with newly married
Bella saying she’s close to both her parents, and Connor saying, “Me and Mum are solid. I love her a lot.”
Despite being sought after for both TV and film work, Nicole has made spending time with Keith and their daughters a priority, and together they form a close family unit.
“We’re very tight,” says Nicole. “And we’re hard to penetrate, we’ve been told. We almost have our own language.”
On the occasions when she does have to be apart from them, she makes sure it won’t be for too long.
“I don’t want to miss out on things with my daughters, so that’s why I now say no to a lot.”
‘ The strongest force I can find within me, right now, is the maternal force’