Kidman reigns at this year’s Cannes
49-year-old stars in three festival favourites
NICOLE Kidman is the undisputed queen of the Cannes film festival which opens today in the French Riviera resort, starring in three of its most eagerly awaited films.
The Australian actress is in two in the running for its top prize, the Palme d’Or, and plays a fashion and music maven in How to Talk to Girls at Parties in the official selection.
The film, adapted from a Neil Gaiman short story, has Kidman adopting Elle Fanning’s alien as her protégè.
Kidman also shows her trademark mix of hauteur and vulnerability as a pent-up governess of a Mississippi girls school in Sofia Coppola’s highly touted remake of The Beguiled.
The film, set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, has Colin Farrell as an injured Union soldier who seduces Kidman’s charges and drives her wild with desire.
She teams up with the Irish actor again in Greek maestro Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer, this time as his wife in the story of a surgeon who gets disastrously drawn into the life of a dysfunctional family.
While the 49-year-old has never won a prize at Cannes, she has long been a festival favourite, taking a string of arthouse roles even after becoming one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars after her split from her first husband Tom Cruise.
It was one of many reinventions that have taken the high-school dropout from Australian teen movies like BMX Bandits to the top of her profession. Kidman has never lacked daring, risking working with the notorious Danish auteur Lars von Trier, who was later banned from Cannes after saying he was a Nazi.
“One day it would be a fairytale, the next it a nightmare,” she said of working with him on Dogville.
Others told how she had to grin and bear humiliations and mind games on the set.
Even when she was headlining big-budget blockbusters like Batman Forever in 1995, Kidman made time for whip-smart roles in indie films such as Gus van Sant’s satire on fame, To Die For, which confirmed her as a major talent.
But she had to wait until 2003 for a best actress Oscar for her depiction of tortured novelist Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours.
Two more nominations have followed, the latest for Lion last year.
Its storyline, of a young man from India adopted by an Australian family who searches for his long-lost relatives on Google Earth, resonated with Kidman.
She adopted two children with Tom Cruise, and has had two others since with country singer Keith Urban. She said she felt an immediate connection with the woman she portrayed, Sue Brierley.
She will also be on the red carpet for the fourth time at Cannes for a special screening of her friend Jane Campion’s second season of TV series Top of the Lake, in which Kidman is almost unrecognisable as a foil to Elisabeth Moss’s small-town detective. — AFP