IS A HAT-TRICK IN THE CANNES FOR NICOLE?

NICOLE Kidman could be gracing the Cannes Film Festival next month with three movies.

The Oscar- winning actress ( right) gives, from what I’m hearing, a ‘magnificent’ performance in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film The Killing Of A Sacred Deer, in which she is the wife of a surgeon (Colin Farrell).

Lanthimos made the much talked about Cannes suc- cess The Lobster, which also starred Farrell. The line-up for the 70th Festival will be revealed next Thursday; and my Parisian friends tell me to expect to see this movie on the list of official competition films. That would be nice for Film4, which has backed Lanthimos’s works, including The Favourite, shooting in London now, with this year’s Best- Actress Oscar winner Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman. Nicole’s second film is likely to be How To Talk to Girls At Parties, about aliens who hang out in Croydon, South London. I was on the set with the actress and it was a wild and wacky affair — and that’s just Nicole’s wig! The picture is rumoured to have a slot in one of the Festival’s sidebars.

And the third offering? That’s director Sofia Coppola’s study of The Beguiled (again starring Farrell), about a wounded Yankee soldier who hides out in a school for young women in Confederate-held Virginia.

‘I like the directors and writers who don’t play safe,’ Nicole once told me. That ethos helps keep her at the top of her game.