This is hard to imagine: Twenty years of Nicole Kidman.
“I know, I know, they’ll soon be calling me ‘veteran actor Nicole Kidman,’ ” said the woman who first went public at age 16 in 1983, playing a checkout girl in an Australian teen movie called “BMX Bandits.”
“Some days, I really feel like one too,” Kidman said. “But these past couple of years, there has been this feeling, I’m not sure exactly how to describe it … a freshness, I suppose. Whatever it is, I don’t want it to disappear.”
Two years ago, Kidman said, she was in severe pain, emotionally–after her divorce from Tom Cruise–and physically, a consequence of a knee injury she called debilitating.
“Without sounding too dramatic about it, I really did think there was a possibility I would never act again,” Kidman said.
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With heart and knee on the mend, Kidman threw herself into work, earning her first Academy Award nomination for “Moulin Rouge,” making a surprise box-office hit out of the thriller “The Others” and then taking the role of Virginia Woolf in “The Hours,” a decision that resulted in a best actress Oscar.
It now seems likely Kidman will be nominated for another, for playing Ada, a pampered minister’s daughter forced to learn to survive, in the Civil War drama “Cold Mountain.”
How Kidman got to “Cold Mountain” is a story in itself. The short version is that when Charles Frazier’s novel was published, she found herself lost in the tale of a wounded Confederate deserter who walks away from a hospital to return to Cold Mountain, N.C., where Ada, whom he barely knows but loves intensely, is, he hopes, waiting.
“I would read passages from the book to Tom,” she said, “and then I gave it to him and said, ‘You really should consider doing this. This is a great story and a great role.’ “
Cruise took Kidman’s advice and was expected to make the movie with Anthony Minghella, director of “The English Patient” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” But after a year of developing the project, Cruise walked away.
Cruise’s departure meant Minghella could offer the role of Ada to Kidman.
“I had probably envisioned Julianne Moore as Ada when I was reading the book,” Kidman says. “But I admit that I had given thought to how I would play her if I had the opportunity. And as it happened, my ideas and Anthony’s were pretty much in sync.”
If you trust Entertainment Weekly’s annual “Power List,” Kidman is now the most powerful female actor in Hollywood, above even Julia Roberts. Kidman laughs off the power ranking but says she does finally feel the freedom to do “the parts I gravitate to naturally, which usually tend towards literary adaptations” like “Cold Mountain” and “The Human Stain.”
Coming soon
Kidman has three films in the can. In “Dogville,” an experimental drama from director Lars von Trier, Kidman plays a woman on the run from the mob who is harbored by the citizens of a small town in Colorado in the 1930s. Also awaiting release are “The Stepford Wives” and “Birth,” a thriller in which she plays a woman convinced that her dead husband’s soul resides in a 10-year-old boy. Although she has resisted getting involved in lightweight romantic comedy, Kidman finally agreed to play happily married-and-mischievous witch Samantha in a feature version of the old television series “Bewitched” with Will Ferrell.