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Nicole Kidman, (born June 20, 1967, Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.), American-born Australian actress known for her considerable range and versatility as well as for her glamorous looks and cool demeanour.

Early life and career

Kidman was born in Honolulu to Australian parents. She was raised in Sydney and launched her acting career as a teenager. She appeared in made-for-television films and miniseries during her adolescence and debuted as a lead actress in the thriller Dead Calm (1989). The offer of a role in Days of Thunder (1990) drew her to the United States, and while working on that film she began a relationship with costar Tom Cruise; the two were married in 1990 (divorced 2001). Over the next decade Kidman appeared in a dozen films. Her roles included a gangster-loving socialite in Billy Bathgate (1991), an aspiring television journalist in the black comedy To Die For (1995), and an American living in Europe during the 1800s in Jane Campion’s 1996 screen adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1996).

In 1998 Kidman made her stage debut in London, playing five different roles in Sir David Hare’s The Blue Room, a well-received series of vignettes based on Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde. In early 1999 she transferred with the play to New York City for her Broadway debut. That year also saw the release of Eyes Wide Shut, which was an adaptation of another Schnitzler work and was the final film by director Stanley Kubrick. Although billed as a steamy romance featuring real-life couple Kidman and Cruise, it bowed to mixed reviews and disappointing box-office numbers.

Kidman quickly rebounded, however, with a series of diverse roles that highlighted the range of her talent. In the Baz Luhrmann musical fantasy Moulin Rouge! (2001), she starred as a dying courtesan, and the performance earned Kidman her first Academy Award nomination. In 2001 she also appeared in The Others, an atmospheric horror film, and the dark comedy Birthday Girl, in which she played a Russian mail-order bride. Two years later she earned an Academy Award for best actress for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), an adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham. A string of critical successes followed, including Dogville (2003), The Human Stain (2003), Cold Mountain (2003), and Margot at the Wedding (2007).

In 2007 Kidman starred as the coolly menacing Mrs. Coulter in The Golden Compass, an adaptation of Philip Pullman’s controversial fantasy novel. She reteamed with Luhrmann for the romantic drama Australia (2008), playing a prim Englishwoman who arrives in Australia just after World War II to defend land she has inherited. In 2009 she appeared in Nine; the musical featured an all-star cast that included Daniel Day-Lewis, Penélope Cruz, and Marion Cotillard.

Roles from the early 2010s

Kidman then portrayed a grieving mother in Rabbit Hole (2010), a film adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s acclaimed play; for her performance, she received a third Academy Award nomination. She subsequently took a role as a catty rival of Jennifer Aniston’s character in the romantic comedy Just Go with It (2011). In the thriller Trespass (2011), Kidman and Nicolas Cage played a married couple whose home is invaded by thieves. In 2012 she starred as the writer Martha Gellhorn, who was briefly married to Ernest Hemingway, in the HBO movie Hemingway & Gellhorn, and she vamped as the fiancée of a death-row inmate in 1960s Florida in the pulp drama The Paperboy. In the psychological horror film Stoker (2013), Kidman appeared as the emotionally distant mother of a troubled teenage girl.

In 2013 Kidman starred opposite Colin Firth in The Railway Man, an adaptation of a memoir about a former soldier who is seeking the Japanese translator who tortured him while he was held captive during World War II. Kidman teamed with Firth again in the thriller Before I Go to Sleep (2014), about a woman dealing with memory loss induced by a trauma. In 2015 she played both a taxidermist intent on skinning the title character in Paddington, an adaptation of the classic children’s book series about a Peruvian bear in London, and a deputy district attorney in Secret in Their Eyes, a thriller that also starred Julia Roberts as an FBI agent whose daughter is raped and murdered.

Resurgence and subsequent films

After several disappointing releases, Kidman appeared in an assortment of well-received movies, leading some pundits to later declare a “Kidmanaissance.” Her credits from 2016 included the biopic Lion, about an Indian boy who becomes separated from his family, is adopted by an Australian couple, and later, as an adult, searches for his lost relatives. The drama received critical acclaim, and Kidman earned her fourth Oscar nomination. Kidman was especially busy in 2017. She gave an Emmy Award-winning performance as an abused wife in the HBO miniseries Big Little Lies, David E. Kelley’s adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s best-selling novel, and appeared in the second season of Campion’s TV series Top of the Lake. Her film roles that year included the headmistress of a Southern boarding school in Sofia Coppola’s The Beguiled, which was based on a novel by Thomas Cullinan; the wife of a heart surgeon in the psychological thriller The Killing of a Sacred Deer; a band manager in the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s short story How to Talk to Girls at Parties; and a high-strung assistant to a wealthy man with quadriplegia in The Upside.

In Aquaman (2018), Kidman played the mother of the eponymous superhero. She took a turn as the wife of a Baptist preacher, who, with her husband, sends their son to a gay conversion therapy program in Boy Erased (2018), which was based on the memoir (2016) of the same name. Kidman garnered critical acclaim for her performance as a grizzled detective who seeks revenge for a botched undercover assignment from her past in Destroyer (2018). In 2019 she reprised her role in Big Little Lies for a second season and appeared as the well-to-do Mrs. Barbour in The Goldfinch, a film based on Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Also that year Kidman starred in Bombshell, portraying Gretchen Carlson, a former host on Fox News who accused the channel’s president, Roger Ailes, of sexual harassment.

In 2020 Kidman starred in the miniseries The Undoing, which was created by Kelley and centres on a wealthy therapist whose seemingly perfect life unravels when her husband becomes a murder suspect. That year she also appeared in The Prom, a musical in which a New York theatre troupe travels to a small Indiana town to help a gay teenager. She then reteamed with Kelley on Nine Perfect Strangers (2021), a miniseries that was also based on a novel by Moriarty; Kidman was cast as a mysterious guru at an exclusive wellness retreat. She subsequently portrayed Lucille Ball in Aaron Sorkin’s biopic Being the Ricardos (2021), which centres on a turbulent week in the life of Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), both of whom starred in the TV comedy series I Love Lucy. For her performance, Kidman earned her fifth Oscar nomination, for best actress. In the action-drama The Northman (2022), she played a Viking queen whose son seeks revenge for his father’s murder.

Courtesy - The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

This article was most recently revised and updated by Amy Tikkanen.
- Nicole Kidman

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