Nicole Mary Kidman AC is an Australian-American actress and producer who was born on June 20, 1967. Well-known for her work in numerous genres of films and television shows, she has continuously been listed as one of the highest-paid actresses in the world. Numerous awards, such as an Academy Award, a BAFTA, two Primetime Emmys, and six Golden Globes, have been bestowed upon her.
With the 1983 release of BMX Bandits, Nicole Kidman made her feature debut in Australia. Her breakout performances were in the 1989 miniseries Bangkok Hilton and the film Dead Calm. After landing a supporting role in Days of Thunder (1990), she quickly rose to popularity on a global scale with roles in the films Far and Away (1992), To Die For (1995), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), The Others (2001), and Cold Mountain (2003).
| Born | 20 June 1967 (age 56 years), Honolulu, Hawaii, United States |
| Other names | Nicole Urban |
| Citizenship | Australia United States |
| Occupations | Actress producer |
| Years active | 1983–present |
| Organization | Blossom Films |
| Spouses | Tom Cruise (m. 1990; div. 2001) Keith Urban (m. 2006) |
| Children | 4 |
| Parent | Antony Kidman (father |
After portraying Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), Kidman received the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was nominated for other Oscars in Moulin Rouge! (2001), Rabbit Hole (2010), Lion (2016), and Being the Ricardos (2021). Apart from other popular films like Australia (2008), Paddington (2014), The Golden Compass (2007), Aquaman (2018), and 2019’s Bombshell, Dogville (2003), Birth (2004), Margot at the Wedding (2007), The Paperboy (2012), Stoker (2013), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and Boy Erased (2018) are just a few of the small-scale, frequently experimental productions that Kidman is well-known for.
Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012), Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017), The Undoing (2020), Nine Perfect Strangers (2021), and Special Ops: Lioness (2023) are just a few of Kidman’s television credits. She won Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress and Outstanding Limited Series for her work as executive producer on the HBO series Big Little Lies (2017–2019).
Early life
On June 20, 1967, Nicole Mary Kidman was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, while her Australian parents were visiting the country for a short time on student visas. Her father, Antony Kidman, was a scientist, clinical psychologist, and novelist; her mother, a nursing educator and Women’s Electoral Lobby member, edited her husband’s works. She also has a younger sister, TV presenter and journalist Antonia Kidman. Kidman is a dual citizen of the United States and Australia. She was born in the American state of Hawaii to Australian parents. Her background is Scottish, Irish, and English. Given her Hawaiian birthplace, she was given the name “Hōkūlani” (pronounced [hoːkuːˈlɐni]), which translates to “heavenly star”. The idea originated from a newborn elephant that was born at the Honolulu Zoo.
Kidman’s father was a PhD student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa when she was born. He was appointed as a visiting fellow at the US National Institute of Mental Health. Her parents, who had relocated to Washington, D.C., soon after Kidman was born, were opposed to the Vietnam War and took part in anti-war demonstrations. After three years, her family did eventually go back to Australia. She was raised in Sydney, where she went to North Sydney Girls’ High School and Lane Cove Public School. She began taking ballet lessons when she was three years old, and throughout elementary and high school, she demonstrated her innate ability for acting.
Kidman has stated that after seeing Margaret Hamilton’s portrayal of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz, she initially decided she wanted to be an actress. “I am very shy – really shy – I even had a stutter as a kid, which I slowly got over, but I still regress into that shyness,” she said, admitting that she had been timid as a child. Thus, I dislike entering a busy restaurant by myself and attending parties by myself.” She discovered performing to be a haven, so during her adolescence, she studied drama and mime at the Australian Theatre for Young People and the Phillip Street Theatre, which she also attended with actress Naomi Watts. Because of her pale complexion With naturally red hair, the sun pushed her to practice in the theater’s hallways. She was motivated to pursue acting full-time by her regular attendance at the Phillip Street Theatre, so she dropped out of high school to do just that.
Career
Kidman debuted on screen as a 16-year-old in a 1983 adaptation of the Australian holiday classic Bush Christmas. She earned a supporting part in the TV show Five Mile Creek at the end of that year. Following her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis in 1984, Kidman briefly stopped doing acting and pursued studies in massage therapy in order to assist her mother with physical therapy. She started to become well-known during this decade after starring in a number of Australian motion pictures, including the romantic comedy Windrider (1986) and the action comedy BMX Bandits (1983). She had several appearances on Australian television throughout the remainder of the 1980s, notably in the 1987 miniseries Vietnam, for which she was honored with her first Australian Film Institute Award.
Kidman then starred in the 1988 Australian film Emerald City, which was adapted on the play of the same name and won her a second AFI Award. Later, she co-starred with Sam Neill in the thriller Dead Calm (1989), as Rae Ingram, a naval officer’s wife who faces threats from Billy Zane’s character, a castaway at sea. It turned out to be her breakout performance, and it was among the first movies for which she was recognized globally. Variety said of her performance, “Kidman is excellent throughout the film.” She imbues Rae with genuine determination and fire.
Critic Roger Ebert, meanwhile, praised the characters’ great chemistry, saying, “Kidman and Zane do produce real, visceral animosity in their scenes in unison. After that, she starred in the Australian miniseries Bangkok Hilton. Later, she co-starred with her future ex-husband, Tom Cruise, in the sports action movie Days of Thunder (1990), playing a young doctor who develops feelings for a NASCAR racer. Reviewed as her global breakthrough picture, it ranked among the year’s biggest grossing movies.
Established Actress (2004–2009)
Kidman co-starred in the drama film Birth in 2004. The scene in which she takes a bath with her ten-year-old co-star Cameron Bright caused controversy at the time. “It wasn’t that I wanted to make a film where I kiss a 10-year-old boy,” she said in response to the controversy during a press conference at the 61st Venice International picture Festival. My aim was to create a movie that makes love understandable.
She was nominated for a seventh Golden Globe for her performance. She starred with Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler, Christopher Walken, and Glenn Close in the science fiction black comedy The Stepford Wives that same year. Frank Oz had originally directed the original film of the same name in 1975. She starred beside Sean the following year. Penn portrayed UN translator Silvia Broome in Sydney Pollack’s thriller The Interpreter. She also costarred with Will Ferrell in the romantic comedy Bewitched, which was adapted from the sitcom of the same name on TV in the 1960s. Both movies were huge hits abroad, even if none did well in the US. She and Ferrell won the Razzie Award for Worst Screen Couple for the latter movie.
Along with her achievements in the movie business, Kidman was chosen to represent the Chanel No. 5 fragrance line. During the Christmas seasons of 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2008, she starred in a campaign of print and television advertisements alongside Rodrigo Santoro, created by Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann, to promote the fragrance. Kidman broke the record for the most amount paid to an actor per minute when she appeared in No. 5 the Film, a three-minute commercial for Chanel No. 5, which reportedly brought her US$12 million. She was also listed on Forbes’ 2005 Celebrity 100 List as the 45th Most Powerful Celebrity during this period. It is reported that she earned $14.5 million USD in 2004 and 2005. Listed by People magazine as At US$16–17 million per film, Kidman was ranked second among 2005’s highest-paid actresses, after Julia Roberts.
For the Australian period picture Australia (2008), which is set in the isolated Northern Territory during the Japanese invasion on Darwin during World War II, Kidman reteamed with Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann the next year. She portrayed an Englishwoman who was feeling overpowered by the continent, starring alongside Hugh Jackman. Despite receiving conflicting reviews from critics, the movie made over $211 million at the box office globally on a $130 million budget. Her role as the muse Claudia Jenssen in the Rob Marshall musical Nine in 2009 had Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Kate Hudson, and Sophia Loren in the ensemble cast. Considering her little screen time compared to the other actresses, Kidman played the musical song “Unusual Way” with Day-Lewis. The movie was nominated for multiple Golden Globe Awards and Academy Awards. Kidman won her fourth nomination for a Screen Actors Guild Award, which was part of the Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture category.
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; her costars included Laura Dern, Reese Witherspoon, and Zoë Kravitz. That year Kidman also appeared in the second season of Campion’s TV series Top of the Lake. Her film roles in 2017 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.
Relationships And Family
Kidman married country music performer Keith Urban in 2006 after being wed to actor Tom Cruise from 1990 to 2001. Kidman and Cruise were married on Christmas Eve in 1990 in Colorado. They had first met in 1989 while working together on the production of the movie Days of Thunder. The couple adopted a son and a daughter while they were married. A spokesman for the couple declared their split on February 5, 2001. Two days later, Cruise filed for divorce; later that year, their marriage was terminated, with Cruise alleging irreconcilable differences. In a 2007 interview with Marie Claire, Kidman brought up the inaccurate reporting of an early-marriage miscarriage: “Everyone who picked up the story wrongly reported it as a miscarriage. That’s great news, but it never happened. I experienced an ectopic pregnancy at the start of my marriage, but I lost my pregnancy at the conclusion.
Despite their divorce, Kidman admitted that she still had feelings for Cruise in the June 2006 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal, writing, “He was tremendous; still is. He was just Tom to me, but he’s big to everyone else. However, I adored him and he was kind to me. I adore him still. She also conveyed her shock at the divorce. In a 2015 documentary, former Church of Scientology administrator Mark Rathbun stated that he was given the go-ahead to “assist [Cruise’s] break-up with Nicole Kidman. Additionally, according to Cruise’s auditor, Kidman was wiretapped at Cruise’s recommendation. During her 2015 Women in the World conference, Tina Brown said in an interview that the publicity surrounding her during her divorce from Cruise led to saying, “Out of my divorce came work that was applauded, so that was an interesting thing for me,” to draw more attention to her career from the general public. Not long after her divorce, in 2003, she went on to win an Oscar.
Kidman had relationships with Australian actor Marcus Graham and Windrider co-star Tom Burlinson before she married Cruise. Rumors that Kidman’s marriage had broken down because of an affair with co-star Jude Law were sparked by the movie Cold Mountain. Kidman received an undisclosed payment from the British tabloids that carried the story, and both rejected the accusations. Before being engaged to artist Lenny Kravitz in 2003, she had been seeing him; however, they ultimately chose to call it quits. Additionally, she had a romantic relationship with rapper Q-Tip.
In a 2007 Vanity Fair interview, Kidman disclosed that before she started dating Australian-New Zealander country singer Keith Urban, whom she first met in 2005 at G’Day LA, an event honoring Australians, she had been secretly engaged to someone. It was subsequently disclosed that this person was Lenny Kravitz. On June 25, 2006, Kidman wed Urban in the Sydney St. Patrick’s Estate, Manly, Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel.193194 About her relationship with Urban, Kidman stated in a 2015 interview, “We didn’t really know each other – we got to know each other during our marriage. They own residences in Beverly Hills, California, Nashville, Tennessee, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, Nashville, Nashville, Nashville, and Sutton Forest, New South Wales, Australia, as well as two apartments in Sydney.
And a Manhattan apartment (New York, U.S.). Sunday Rose, the couple’s first child, was born in Nashville in 2008. Kidman and Urban welcomed Faith Margaret, their second daughter, into their family in 2010 at Nashville’s Centennial Women’s Hospital through gestational surrogacy .
Acting Credits and awards
Some of Kidman’s highest-scoring movies are Paddington (2014), Flirting (1990), To Die For (1995), Rabbit Hole (2010), Lion (2016), The Others (2001), The Family Fang (2015), Dead Calm (1989), Boy Erased (2018), The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and The Northman (2022), according to review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, which assigns movie scores based on critic reviews and audience reception. According to the box office tracking website The Numbers, her highest-grossing films include Aquaman (2018), Happy Feet (2006), The Golden Compass (2008), Batman Forever (1995), and Paddington (2014). These are her most financially successful films. Her additional on-screen credits consist of:
- Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
- Moulin Rouge! (2001)
- The Hours (2002)
- Dogville (2003)
- Cold Mountain (2003)
- Birth (2004)
- Australia (2008)
- The Paperboy (2012)
- The Beguiled (2017)
- Destroyer (2018)
- Bombshell (2019)
- Being the Ricardos (2021)
Honours
The United Nations recognized Kidman as a “Citizen of the World” in 2004. She received an appointment as a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) during the 2006 Australia Day Honours for her “career to the performing arts as a renowned motion picture performer, to health care through advocacy for cancer research and contributions to improve medical treatment for women and children, to youth as a principal supporter of young performing artists, and to humanitarian causes in Australia and internationally.
However, she wasn’t given the honor until April 13, 2007, because of her marriage to Urban and her obligations to films. Major General Michael Jeffery, the Australian governor general, gave it to the recipient during a ceremony held at Government House in Canberra. In the start 2009, Kidman made an appearance on a set of postal stamps with actors from Australia. In the series, she, Cate Blanchett, Geoffrey Rush, and Russell Crowe all make two appearances—once as themselves, and again as their Academy Award-nominated roles. Kidman plays Satine from Moulin Rouge!..
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