Nicole Kidman

The Stigma of the Woman in Red

At five feet ten, Nicole Kidman almost missed out on her first serious casting in Australia. In 1983 she made her debut in Bush Christmas at just fourteen years old. But it was the suspense of Dead Calm in 1989 that convinced Tom Cruise to push for her to be cast in her next American project.

During the 1990s, her name appeared in the credits always tied to her husband's. They made Days of Thunder and Far and Away together while the press focused more on her height than on her dramatic ability. And although To Die For earned her a Golden Globe in 1995, the general public still saw her as a luxury accessory on the red carpet.

That year, Kidman stopped being someone's wife and became simply an actress.

In 2001 she finalized her divorce and released Moulin Rouge! and The Others back to back. The first earned her her first Academy Award nomination, and the second proved she could carry a psychological horror film without digital effects. Kidman has always preferred physical risk to the comfort of the romantic comedies being offered to her at the time.

A prosthetic nose and the commercial wasteland

In 2002 she agreed to hide her face behind a latex prosthetic to play Virginia Woolf in The Hours. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress and became the first Australian to do so. But after reaching the top with Stephen Daldry, she entered a phase of erratic decisions that nearly sank her reputation at the international box office.

She went from one failed project to another, such as Bewitched in 2005 or The Golden Compass in 2007. Critics were harsh about her alleged cosmetic enhancements and her lack of connection with younger audiences. So she decided to retreat into the most austere kind of auteur cinema by working with Lars von Trier on Dogville, a film shot on an empty set with chalk marks on the floor.

The industry had written her off commercially.

But in 2010 she bought the rights to the play Rabbit Hole to produce it herself. The story of a mother's grief earned her critics' respect back and a new Oscar nomination. It was the first step in her new strategy: if Hollywood wouldn't write interesting roles for women over forty, she would finance them herself.

A Refuge on the Small Screen

Nobody expected a movie star to move to cable television.

In 2017 she produced and starred in Big Little Lies for HBO alongside Reese Witherspoon. The series won eight Emmy Awards and changed the way A-list actresses manage their careers. She no longer had to wait for a major studio to call, because her own production company, Blossom Films, already controlled the rights to the market's best-selling novels.

In 2020 she kept using that formula with The Undoing, and in 2021 with Nine Perfect Strangers. In 2024 she premiered Expats on Prime Video (a miniseries set in Hong Kong that she supervised from start to finish). But Kidman never left the big screen, and in 2021 she received another nomination for playing Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos.

In September 2024, she won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival for her role in the erotic thriller Babygirl. She could not accept the award in person due to the death of her mother just hours before the ceremony. The contract for that film included a specific safety clause for the nude scenes with actor Harris Dickinson.