Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman, born in 1967, Australian American motion-picture actor, whose willowy elegance and redheaded beauty quickly made her a Hollywood celebrity. Critical acclaim for her acting, however, came only after honing her craft in a variety of different movie roles.

Kidman was born to Australian parents in Honolulu, Hawaii, and lived in the United States until four years of age when her family returned to Australia and settled in Sydney. As a child she took ballet, mime, and drama lessons. She performed regularly at Sydney’s Philip Street Theatre as a teenager and dropped out of high school to pursue acting full time at the age of 16.

In 1986 Kidman won an Australian Film Institute award for her role as a schoolgirl who becomes an antiwar protester in the television miniseries Vietnam. She starred in several other Australian dramas before gaining international attention in Dead Calm (1989), a thriller about a woman trapped aboard a yacht with a psychopath.

Kidman then moved to California. Her first American film performances met with lukewarm critical reception. One of these was Days of Thunder (1990), a film starring American actor Tom Cruise, and the two were married by the end of the year. They teamed up again as young Irish immigrants in Far and Away (1992) by director Ron Howard. Seeking more complex roles, in 1995 she starred as a manipulative, homicidal journalist in the black comedy To Die For. The film showcased her comedic talent and brought Kidman a Golden Globe Award for best actress. The same year she also starred as a seductive criminal psychologist in the star-studded Batman Forever.

In 1996 Kidman landed the coveted lead role in The Portrait of a Lady (1996), the story of a headstrong young American woman adapted from the Henry James novel and directed by New Zealander Jane Campion. The following year Kidman took on an action role in a movie about nuclear terrorism, The Peacemaker.

Kidman and Cruise teamed up again to work on the highly anticipated Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut (1999), a film about infidelity and sexual fantasy that received mixed reviews. Kidman followed this up with a starring role in Moulin Rouge! (2001), an elaborate musical hit for which she received another Golden Globe Award as well as an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Kidman and Cruise were divorced in 2001. In 2002 Kidman played British writer Virginia Woolf in the critically acclaimed film The Hours, a role that earned her an Academy Award for best actress. After appearing in two remakes, The Stepford Wives (2004) and Bewitched (2005), and the Sydney Pollack thriller The Interpreter (2005), she portrayed the photographer Diane Arbus in the unconventional biopic Fur (2006). In 2007 she starred as the icy villainess Mrs. Coulter in the movie The Golden Compass, based on the fantasy novel by English author Philip Pullman.