EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH NICOLE KIDMAN
Losing an Oscar role to Kate Winslet, how I’ve struggled like Grace Kelly... and why I do have regrets over THAT movie
ARADIANT and relaxed Nicole Kidman is holding court in the luxurious grounds of the six-star Hotel du Cap in the South of France. In just a few hours’ time the Oscar winner’s controversial new movie about the life of the late Princess Grace of Monaco will open the Cannes Film Festival – and receive the sort of critical drubbing which would cause most A-list stars to go into hiding.
But if the Moulin Rouge and The Hours actress is feeling the pressure from the furore surrounding the film, she isn’t letting it show.
In fact the 46-year-old mother of four is determined to confront the controversy head on, and in one of her most personal interviews to date she reveals how:
She regrets turning down a chance of face-to-face talks with Princess Grace’s family about the film.
She lets her musician husband vet her film roles and would turn her back on Hollywood if he asked her to do so.
She turned down the starring role in the acclaimed Holocaust drama The Reader because she didn’t want the film’s harrowing story to ‘penetrate her baby’ while she was pregnant.
Speaking just hours before Grace Of Monaco’s glitzy premiere on Wednesday, Kidman admitted she was nervous about the film’s reception but also said she could identify with a woman trying to life a normal life in a ‘gilded cage’.
She was also indebted to Thierry Fremaux, director of the Cannes Film Festival, for choosing it as the festival’s opening film.
She said: ‘I was nervous, because I am always nervous, but at the same time it was nice when someone was finally embracing it [the film] because there has been an enormous amount of controversy.
‘Thiery was very, very strong in his support of it, which I am so appreciative for. He was willing to go out on a limb for it and that’s enormously helped the film.’
Grace Of Monaco has been dogged by controversy ever since it began shooting. Grace Kelly’s son Prince Albert, who is the current ruler of Monaco, and his sisters Princesses Stephanie and Caroline have dismissed it as ‘needlessly glamorised’ and ‘historically inaccurate’.
Even Olivier Dahan, the film’s acclaimed French director, has distanced himself from the final cut of the movie which he insists is the work of the film’s distributor Harvey Weinstein. While Kidman will take comfort from the fact that her own performance has attracted some favourable reviews, there is no escaping the hostile reaction to the ‘lamentable’ script.
One critic described the end product as so wooden ‘it is a fire hazard’. But Kidman, whose other big-screen credits include Cold Mountain, The Others and Eyes Wide Shut, insists that as the film’s star she can’t get involved in the rights and wrongs of a particular project.
She said: ‘If I was producing the movie, it would be a different thing. My loyalty has to be to the film and the director, that’s where I stand.
‘Everything else, I am not that privy to. Whether they are protect- ing me or not telling me, that’s OK. I’ll stay in the bubble. That’s my job. You can’t get involved in all those things operating around a film when you are acting, because that takes the energy away from the performance.’
KIDMAN says she can understands why Monaco’s ruling family may have concerns and only regrets not tackling those head-on. ‘They invited me for lunch, but I was shooting six days a week and I had my small children and my mother and my aunt. I couldn’t take all these people.
‘Now subsequently I wish I would which once enchanted the world has now been replaced by a marriage strained to breaking point. The Princess feels trapped by her royal life and longs to make one more film with her old mentor Alfred Hitchcock.
In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, she confides: ‘I don’t know how I am going to spend the rest of my life in a place where I can’t be me.’
Kidman said: ‘I knew all her films. And I knew that she married Rainier. What I didn’t know was that the transition from American movie star to European royalty was more difficult than I would have thought. She was very young. The have gone, because I would have been able to explain to them the intentions.’ She added: ‘It’s very threatening if someone plays your mother. But I would hope that they would know that there was an enormous amount of respect and love behind everything that was done.’
Kidman said working on the film had not only provided her with new insights into the Princess’s life but had made her realise just how much she had in common with her.
Grace Of Monaco begins in 1962 when the former Hollywood actress Grace Kelly has been married to Monaco’s ruler Prince Rainier, played by Tim Roth, for six years.
The couple’s fairytale romance
way the marriage happened, and suddenly she was pregnant.
‘All of those things happened very quickly. A lot of the struggles that she had, I’ve had. Not in terms of being a princess, but the gilded cage and motherhood versus career versus responsibility versus the desire to put good in the world. All of those struggles and the desire to keep a marriage together. All of those things are very relevant to me. She is very human in her desires and that is what surprised me in the script.’
Kidman, who won an Academy Award playing novelist Virginia Woolf in the 2002 film The Hours, said it was never her intention to impersonate the Princess, who died in a car crash in 1982.
She said: ‘There was a 60 Minutes television interview that she did three weeks before she passed away, which was very, very sad. I studied her intonations, but I didn’t want to mimic her.
‘Olivier said, “You definitely don’t want to mimic her. If we had wanted that, we would have hired a mimic.”’
Kidman, who shot to fame in the 1989 film Dead Calm, has been in the public eye for 25 years and has long got used to the public fascination with her own private life.
She was married to Tom Cruise for 11 years until their very public divorce in 2001, and her second marriage to New Zealand-born country star Keith Urban has not been without its challenges.
Just months after they tied the knot in 2006, Urban checked himself in the Betty Ford clinic for his alcohol abuse.
After everything she has gone through it is perhaps not surprising that Kidman now insists that her family comes before her career.
The star, who adopted two children with Cruise and who has two daughters with Urban, says she wouldn’t hesitate to walk away from Holly- wood if that is want those closest to her wanted.
She also says she wouldn’t have taken the role of Grace if Urban hadn’t wanted her to do it. She confided: ‘If he said no, I wouldn’t have done it. That’s how we are.
‘I know this sounds old-fashioned, but I do put it on the table. Because if it won’t work for us, then I’m not doing it.’
Asked if she would ever choose between film and family she said: ‘Yeah, if he asked me. No question.’
Kidman could have very well won a second Oscar when she was cast as lead character Hanna Schmitz in the 2008 film The Reader but she decided to leave the project when she began to worry about the impact it might have on her unborn child.
She said: ‘I got pregnant and I was meant to do The Reader. And they said, “Oh can you still do it?” But I cannot work pregnant. The way I work, it would penetrate my baby.’
She added: ‘I know now what I probably didn’t know in my 20s. I would absolutely know now that I would always choose the sanctity and sacredness of my family, and if that was ever in jeopardy, no question.’
The role of Hanna eventually went to Kate Winslet, who did indeed win the Best Actress Oscar for her performance.
DESPITE her need to put her family first, Kidman insists that her feminist credentials are still intact and she remains committed to the cause of women’s rights. She said: ‘I was raised to speak my mind. I was raised by a feminist mother. So my antenna for that is very strong.
‘I am a huge believer in the education of women, which is why I sit here and say in terms of the girls in Nigeria that have been kidnapped, we have to fight to bring them back. Being born female your birthright gives you the right for education.’
Kidman is adamant that she has not yet given what she calls her best performance, though at least one of her up-coming four films is unlikely to trouble Academy voters.
She joked: ‘I just did Paddington Bear. I played the villain, but that was for my kids, because the bear is adorable. That was an offering because they would be on set with me. So that was funny.’
Kidman said women still faced an uphill struggle to make their mark in a male-dominated Hollywood but she insisted there were some signs of improvement.
She said: ‘Chauvinism for me in Hollywood has not been that strong, but it absolutely does exist. It is lessening now.’
Kidman said she was more worried about doing a ‘Jennifer Lawrence’ and tripping up on the red carpet than she was about any of the bad reviews.
She said: ‘My nerves are more to do with not tripping up the stairs. Those sort of things – that’s the harder part. As for the performances, I have been booed, I’ve been cheered and everything in between. I have run the gamut.’