Nicole Kidman given life achievement award by American Film Institute
Nicole Kidman has been honoured with an American Film Institute life achievement award at a ceremony in which stars shared stories of “quite simply one of the greatest actresses”.
The Oscar-winner became the first Australian actor to receive the highest honour for a career in film at AFI, during a ceremony that featured speeches from Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman, Reese Witherspoon, and Kidman’s husband, Keith Urban.
The Gala Tribute at the Dolby Theatre
in Los Angeles also included appearances from Kidman’s former co-stars including Miles Teller from Rabbit Hole, The Paperboy’s Zac Efron, Zoe Saldana from Special Ops: Lioness, and Joey King from the upcoming film A Family Affair.
The ceremony opened with a video of Freeman in a parody of Kidman’s AMC Theatres advert, before he took to the stage telling the audience that the 2001 film Moulin Rouge, starring Kidman and Ewan McGregor, was “one of my favourite films of all time”.
Streep, who co-starred in The Hours which won Kidman an Oscar in 2003, presented the award.
She joked that “the very hardest part of being incessantly called the greatest actress of our generation” was working with really great actors such as Kidman – “that’s difficult”.
“The range of your work is stunning, your list of credits and roles and good deeds in the world would take a normal person three lifetimes to achieve,” she said. “Your life and your résumé challenge everything we know about how many hours there are in the day and how many places a woman can be in one time. It’s hard not to envy Nicole, but it is also impossible not to be in awe of her.”
Streep said she was “floored” by Kidman’s performance on the first day of shooting the TV series Big Little Lies. “That’s the time I came within breathing distance of the formidable gifts Nicole has, and her process, and her seismic bank of emotions that she’s got locked up within her, and her stamina and her drive to be an artist and her discipline. I haven’t recovered from that first day, I have never seen anything like that in my life.”
Collecting her award, Kidman said Streep has been her “guiding light” during her career, adding: “It has always been you, and no one can touch you.”
Kidman praised all the directors she