Nicole Kidman - biography

Nicole Kidman biography
Nicole Kidman is a beautiful actress and female celebrity. She born 20 June, 1967 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father is Antony Kidman. Australian; involved with labor movement and progressive causes. Her mother is Janelle Kidman. Australian; edits her husband's books; involved with feminist causes; was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1984.

A statuesque Australian redhead with creamy alabaster skin and blue eyes that cast a slightly mischievous air, Nicole Kidman had become established in her native land as a rising talent before she ventured to the USA where she met her future husband Tom Cruise during the filming of 1990's "Days of Thunder".

Born in Hawaii to a biochemist and psychologist father and an activist nursing instructor mother, Kidman spent her first years living in the Washington, DC, area. By the time she was three, she and her parents had returned to Australia and settled in conservative, upper-middle-class suburb of Sydney. As a toddler, she was enrolled in ballet classes and at age four got a taste of theatrical life by stealing her school's Christmas pageant, garnering laughs as a sheep who upstaged the Nativity scene.

By the age of 10, Kidman had been enrolled in drama school and four years later made her first real impression as a frizzy-haired teen in the Australian holiday perennial "Bush Christmas" (1983). By that time, she had become a regular on the TV series "Five Mile Creek", appearing in the show's final 12 episodes. Her profile rose even higher after an award-winning performance in the miniseries 1985 "Vietnam" which first teamed her with director John Duigan. She continued her rise in the comedy "Emerald City" (1988), delivering a nice turn as the girlfriend of a script supervisor (Chris Hayward) who catches the attention of a screenwriter (John Hargreaves).

That film was followed by a terrific portrayal of a young woman who is duped into becoming a drug smuggler, gets caught and is imprisoned in the gripping TV drama "Bangkok Hilton" (1989). That same year, Kidman broke through to international art-house audiences offering one of her finest performances as the traumatized young wife of a middle-aged doctor (Sam Neill) coping with the accidental death of their only child by embarking on a yachting trip that turns threatening when they rescue a stranger (Billy Zane) in the superb thriller "Dead Calm".

The actress reteamed with director John Duigan for his excellent "Flirting" (1990) to essay a snooty schoolgirl. By the time the film reached US shores in 1991, though, Kidman had already become known as the actress who snared superstar Tom Cruise after co-starring with him in the race-car drama "Days of Thunder" (1990). Their whirlwind courtship and subsequent marriage proved fodder for the gossip columns and surprised many. In an effort to distance herself a bit from the label of "Mrs. Tom Cruise", Kidman accepted the part of a society girl who gets mixed up with gangsters in the Robert Benton-directed period drama "Billy Bathgate" (1991), holding her own opposite Dustin Hoffman. Unfortunately, the film failed to appeal to audiences and was a box-office failure.

A reteaming with her husband in the Ron Howard-directed would-be epic "Far and Away" (1992) was also a commercial disappointment. Kidman had her moments as a headstrong Irish lass who determines to follow a penniless worker to America in the mid-19th Century, but the film's muddled screenplay undercut her efforts. Although she went on to appear as a wife desperate to have a child in "Malice" and the supportive spouse of a dying man in "My Life" (both 1993), neither did much to raise her profile or challenge her as an actor. Making a clearly economic decision, Kidman was cast as the love interest to Val Kilmer's Bruce Wayne/Batman in the overblown "Batman Forever" (1995).

Later that year, though, she finally had a chance to prove her mettle to US audiences with a brilliantly comic turn as an ambitious weather girl who'll do anything to succeed in the satirical "To Die For". Her excellent delineation of self-absorption in the face of ambition was one of the year's finest performances, but surprisingly the expected Oscar nomination never materialized. One theory floated on why the Academy overlooked her is that no one who saw the film could tell where the character ended and the actress began. It also didn't help that the tabloids and gossip pages tried to paint Kidman as relentless. Such a gender-biased discriminatory approach wasn't lost on her. As she pointed out, "Tom [Cruise]'s determination is called intensity. My determination is called ambitious to the point of ruthlessness."

Jane Campion had once offered her the role of Isabel Archer in a film version of Henry James' novel "The Portrait of a Lady", claiming that she couldn't imagine any other actress in the part. Still, after Kidman's string of less than spectacular movies, Campion made the actress audition for the 1996 film. Kidman tore into the role, finding the depth and nuance in the character of an idealistic American who marries into European aristocracy for wealth rather than love. Although some of the directorial flourishes tended to undercut the story, the acting shone through, but once again few gave Kidman the credit she deserved.

Perhaps in a further effort to improve her bankability, she co-starred with George Clooney in the action thriller "The Peacemaker" (1997) and teamed with Sandra Bullock in "Practical Magic" (1998). In an effort to completely overhaul her image and improve her standing in the entertainment business, Kidman returned to the stage, starring opposite Iain Glen in the David Hare play "The Blue Room", first in London and then on Broadway. A loose adaptation of "La Ronde", the play had only the two actors and earned acclaim, but it also generated a bit of controversy over brief nudity.

Before she undertook the stage role, Kidman had signed on with Cruise to play a couple facing difficulties in their marriage in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999). Filmed over a 14-month period from November 1996 to January 1998, "Eyes Wide Shut" was an erotic-tinged fever dream. After the wife (Kidman) confesses to having a sexual fantasy about another man, the husband (Cruise) embarks on a journey that takes him from one charged situation to another, culminating in an orgy. Kubrick died just after completion of the film, but critics greeted it as they had most of his work -- with mixed feelings. Neither Kidman nor Cruise were used to particularly good effect in the film, although she had moments where her skill and grace shone through.

Having earned the tag of "serious actress" after working with Kubrick and on stage, Kidman went to work on back-to-back projects that fully demonstrated her range. In Baz Luhrmann's hyperkinetic "Moulin Rouge!" (2001), Kidman was cast as Satine, a singing and dancing courtesan who falls in love with a penniless writer she at first mistook for a wealthy patron. While her dancing was adequate (perhaps the numerous injuries she sustained from broken ribs to torn cartilage in her knee hindered her), she displayed a pleasant singing voice. Certainly, she and co-star Ewan McGregor had a terrific chemistry that helped compensate for the uneven screenplay. While "Moulin Rouge!" allowed the actress to cut loose, "The Others" (also 2001) required her to portray a high-strung mother living in isolation during WWII. Deftly underplaying the implicit hysteria while also injecting vulnerability in the character, Kidman painted a portrait of a controlling yet all too human woman. "Moulin Rouge!" allowed her to drop the icy reserve that had undercut her work in other roles while "The Others" exploited it, allowing her to craft an emotionally layered performance.

2001 was seemingly Kidman's year to triumph (she was selected by Entertainment Weekly as Entertainer of the Year and she had placed two songs on recording charts around the world, "Come What May", a duet with Ewan McGregor from the "Moulin Rouge!" soundtrack, and "Somethin' Stupid", a remake of the Frank and Nancy Sinatra hit recorded with Robbie Williams), but just as she was ascending professional heights, her personal life appeared to be falling apart. Just after the couple's tenth anniversary. Tom Cruise filed for divorce and a month later Kidman was reported to have suffered a miscarriage. The break with Cruise was shocking, although there were signs of trouble as early as January when the pair arrived separately for the telecast of the Golden Globe awards. Still, the split kept the tabloids and gossip press busy for much of the year, with speculation fueled by Cruise' cryptic statement, "Nic knows exactly why we are getting the divorce."

By year's end, the marriage had been dissolved and the assets distributed. Professionally, Kidman continued on a roll. "Birthday Girl", in which she was cast as a Russian mail-order bride was screened at film festivals in Venice, London and Toronto in 2001 to acclaim and opened theatrically in 2002, just prior to the announcement of the Academy Award nominations, which found her competing in the Best Actress category for "Moulin Rouge!" That same year, Kidman was seen (although was scarecely recognizeable under sparse make-up, mousy brown hair and a prosthetic nose) as British author Virginia Woolf in the film adaptation of the award-winning novel "The Hours" (2002), in which she turned in an understated, absorbing and completely convincing performance as the emotionally troubled writer. Her deft acting and chameleon-like transformation resulted in an Academy Award for Best Actress, as well as a Best Actress win at the Golden Globes (her second trophy in as many years).

She then reunited with "Billy Bathgate" helmer Robert Benton in "The Human Stain" (2003), as the once-abused uneducated janitor Faunia who embarks on a secret love affair with the scholarly Coleman (Anthony Hopkins), a man of mixed race passing as white. The film provided yet another showcase for the both the actress' range and her willingness to bare her body in service of her character. But that role was overshadowed by another, more critically acclaimed 2003 project, director Anthony Minghella's star-crossed Civil War romance "Cold Mountain" in which Kidman played Ada Monroe, a once-sheltered Southern belle who with the help of earthy Ruby (Renee Zellweger) must learn to fend for herself on her farm after her father dies and her beloved Inman (Jude Law) desperately deserts the Confederate army to make his way back to her. Her performance, in which she convincingly matures from helplessness to self-sufficience, put her again at the top of awards nominations lists, though she was surprisingly omitted from Oscar contention.

Kidman's first release of 2004 was the Lars von Trier-helmed "Dogville," which she had filmed prior to "The Human Stain" and "Cold Mountain." The film, which was unrepentantly anti-American in plot and tone--despite von Trier having never visited the country due to a fear of flying--focused on the arrival of the mysterious fugitive from gangsters Grace (Kidman) in the small Rocky Mountain community of Dogville during the Depression, where she is giving a two-week sanctuary before eventually being viewed and victimized as the "property" of the citizenry. The film had a polarizing effect on critics and audiences, most of which were put of by von Trier's extreme anti-American sentiments. Nevertheless, Kidman delivered yet another performance that pushed the boundaries of her dramatic abilities and on-screen sexuality.

After several heavy films in a row, Kidman lightened up with a role in director Frank Oz's satrical 2004 remake of the cult classic horror film "The Stepford Wives," with the Aussie actress as Joanna Ebhart, a corporate ladder climber who moves to Stepford, CT, with her husband (Matthew Broderick) and discovers the community's all-too-perfect wives are the product of a sinister secret. Following rumors of behind-the-scenes dissent on the film, Kidman distanced herself from the project and, following lukewarm critical reception the film failed to catch on with audiences. Next Kidman continued her perchant for finding unorthodox, smaller-scale projects to test her acting range, this time with "Birth" (2004), a brooding, melancholy film in which she played a widowed woman about to remarry who, ten years after her husband's death, encounters a young boy claiming to be the reincarnation of her first husband, pleading with her not to marry her fiance. The film focused more on the psychological aspects than the supernatural, and Kidman, who bobbed and darkened her tradmark tresses to more fully emphasize the subleties of her face, was praised for her complex, spellbinding performance.

In 2005 Kidman, more and more frequently blonde on screen and off, starred in the Sydney Pollack-directed thriller "The Interpreter" as an African-born U.N. translator who alleges that she has overheard a death threat against an African head of state, spoken in a rare dialect few people other than she can understand, but the federal agent (Sean Penn) assigned to protect her suspects there may be something more sinister behind her story. A few months later Kidman headlined the big-screen remake of TV's "Bewitched" opposite Will Ferrell, Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine--director and co-writer Nora Ephron creatively reconceived the magical '60s TV sitcom, casting Kidman as Isabel Bigelow, a reluctant real-life witch who gets cast as the lead Samantha in a Hollywood remake of the beloved series, and by playing the comedy relatively straight she held her own against co-stars, veteran scene-stealers all.

Article and photo source: Yahoo! Movies