‘As I was pale-skinned, I was kept indoors a lot – I couldn’t be running around on the beach with my friends': Nicole Kidman talks childhood, Meerkats and molecules
With an acclaimed West End play, a move to London and a starring role opposite our favourite cuddly critters, life hasn’t exactly been ‘simples’ for the actress lately. But, she tells Jane Mulkerrins, at least she has finally impressed her two young daughters
‘As I was pale-skinned, I was kept indoors a lot – I couldn’t be running around on the beach with my friends. But the benefit of that was that I was reading books, building my inner life,' said Nicole Kidman of her childhood
‘I like to jump off the cliff,’ Nicole Kidman is telling me, in an Australian accent apparently undiluted by more than 25 years working in Hollywood.
‘I’ve jumped off it many times. I’ll just say to myself: “What is the worst that can happen? So people don’t like it; so I fall flat on my face – that’s OK.”’
Indeed, alongside blockbusters that have made her one of the most celebrated actresses of her generation, such as Days of Thunder, Moulin Rouge and The Hours – for which her portrayal of Virginia Woolf won her an Oscar in 2002 – Nicole, 48, has chosen plenty of quirky, risky projects too.
These include Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Lars von Trier’s Dogville; The Paperboy, in which she played a woman who swaps sexually explicit letters with a death-row inmate, and her (briefly naked) West End debut in the 1998 play The Blue Room, which became known as ‘pure theatrical Viagra’, thanks to one particularly fevered critic.
Over the coming months, she has four films on release – including the drama Genius with Jude Law and the thriller Secrets in Their Eyes with Julia Roberts – plus the HBO biopic Queen of the Desert, in which she stars as the English adventurer Gertrude Bell, alongside Damian Lewis.
She is ‘excited and nervous’ to jump off the cliff once more, she tells me, when we meet ahead of her first theatrical outing for 17 years, playing the late British scientist Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51 at London’s Noël Coward Theatre.
‘I am glad to be able to give her a voice now,’ said Nicole who plays the late British scientist Rosalind Franklin in Photograph 51 on the London stage
It’s a searingly hot morning in Los Angeles and I am sitting beneath a canopy in a car park behind an old cinema, in which Nicole is filming.
From time to time, she sashays elegantly past, all slim, statuesque 5ft 10in of her, first in a slinky red dress, then an LBD with cutaway mesh sections, and finally in a white dressing gown and slippers, her strawberry-blonde hair falling in gentle waves around her shoulders.
Inside the cinema, her co-stars today are possibly as well-loved as the A-listers she is accustomed to acting opposite: the meerkats Aleksandr and Sergei, with whom she is filming an advert (following the success of the meerkats’ collaboration with Arnold Schwarzenegger) for Meerkat Movies, a new cinema tickets rewards scheme from comparethemarket.com.
‘Having done Paddington so recently [in which she played the terrifying taxidermist Millicent Clyde], I have a penchant for furry creatures right now,’ she laughs when we talk in her mercifully air-conditioned trailer.
‘Because I have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old [Faith and Sunday Rose, her daughters with country music star husband Keith Urban], I see a lot of things through their eyes,’ she says.
‘And that’s lovely, to be looking at the world in a different way.’
On screen, Nicole is noted for her poise, often portraying characters with a glamorous aloofness – such as Princess Grace of Monaco, or the deliciously evil Suzanne Stone in To Die For – but in person she is warm, funny, self-deprecating and animated.
Eschewing the celebrity lifestyle, Nicole, husband Keith Urban and their two daughters live quietly in Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music
‘They’ve got no interest in the play, but huge interest in the meerkats right now,’ she says of her daughters, one eyebrow raised wryly.
I, however, have a very real interest in ‘the science play’, as she calls it, as it was written by a friend of mine, the young U.S. playwright Anna Ziegler. Nicole is delighted and not a little amazed by the coincidence.
That the play, which was first performed off-Broadway in 2010, was written by a woman was a large part of the project’s appeal.
‘I read a statistic that only two per cent of plays performed on Broadway are written by women, which is shocking,’ she says.
‘And it’s just nice, at this time in my life, to be able to say: this is what I’m going to champion. New plays, women – those are the things I’m passionate about.’
Photograph 51 gets its title from the name given to the X-ray image, taken by a researcher at King’s College London, which first revealed the double-helix shape of DNA and was a crucial starting point for Francis Crick and James Watson, the scientists who, along with Maurice Wilkins, won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for discovering its structure.
Franklin, the chemist overseeing the original discovery almost a decade before, has been largely overlooked by history – she missed out on the Nobel prize, having died of cancer four years earlier aged just 37 – and the play tells the story of her breakthrough, and the sexism of the scientific community that kept her out of the spotlight.
At 24 Nicole starred in Days of Thunder, in which she played a doctor who falls in love with a racing driver – played by her future husband Tom Cruise. They divorced in 2001, after ten years of marriage
‘I am glad to be able to give her a voice now,’ says Nicole, whose performance received a standing ovation on the opening night and has been praised by critics as ‘luminous – an inspiring mix of passion, pride and vulnerability’.
Playing Franklin also holds deep personal significance for Nicole. When she began having discussions about the role, she was thrilled to share the prospect with her father, Antony, a biochemist, to whom she had always been close.
‘When I told my dad last year that I was going to do it, he was so excited,’ she recalls.
‘He was like, “Of course I know all about Rosalind Franklin!”’
But Antony died suddenly of a heart attack in September 2014, aged 75, and it is to his memory that Nicole is dedicating this role.
‘It’s bittersweet for me in that regard. I would say, now, this is for my dad,’ she says.
His death hit the whole family hard: Nicole, her mother Janelle and her younger sister Antonia, a TV presenter and journalist.
At his funeral, Nicole called her father ‘my confidant, my friend and my protector’, and spoke of his unfailing support in her times of need.
‘He was the father that was on a plane, hours after I got divorced [from Tom Cruise], to come and take care of me, staying with me for weeks, for as long as I needed,’ she said.
Nicole in first major international film role came at 23 in the thriller Dead Calm in 1989 (left) and as the deliciously evil Suzanne Stone in To Die For To Die For in 1995 (right)
A year on, she says there are times when she feels, ‘Gosh, I wish I could go and hide in a hole and never come out.’
But the family has leant heavily on one another.
‘We’re very close,’ she says. ‘I went back to Australia and saw my mum a month ago, and my sister has just been here.
'I’ve been doing a lot of travelling to keep the family together – just the three of us women now.’
While her acting skills are clearly as much in demand as ever, it is still family that Nicole’s world revolves around. She and Tom divorced in 2001, after ten years of marriage.
She met fellow native Australian Keith Urban in January 2005, at an event celebrating Australians in the U.S., and they married a year later.
Eschewing the celebrity lifestyle, she, 47-year-old Keith and their daughters live quietly in Nashville, Tennessee, the home of country music, where she grows roses, makes jam, does the school run and is learning to play golf.
In some ways, the Southern city reminds her of Australia.
‘Smaller town, slower pace, which I prefer, and you’re actually living a life, rather than just analysing it and talking about living it,’ she reflects.
‘My daughters have Southern accents; it’s where my husband’s career is, and I love it.’
In 2004, Nicole starred in The Human Stain (left) opposite Anthony Hopkins and as a troubled young widow in Birth (right)
They are deeply embedded in the city’s musical community (which includes Jack White and Taylor Swift); their friends are singers and songwriters and they spend many an evening at the renowned but low-key live music spot, the Bluebird Café.
However, Nicole admits, being a mother of two young children means the majority of evenings are actually cosy ones in.
‘I put on my pyjamas and I’m like: “Come on Keith, let’s not go out – let’s watch a TV show or a movie at home.”’
As a musician, however, Keith, who also acts as a coach on the Australian version of The Voice, has a necessarily itinerant lifestyle.
‘He’s a touring musician – they’re used to being on the road,’ she shrugs.
‘That’s what he’s always done and he loves it. He’s willing to travel and make it work.’
I ask whether they have rules about how often they see one another – such as, I suggest, every ten days.
‘Oh no, ten days is way too long,’ Nicole exclaims. ‘We’re seven. And we rarely stretch it to that. The kids don’t like the separation.’
Whenever possible, they travel as a family; they are all in London together for the run of Photograph 51.
‘The kids love that, too. They have quite a few stamps in their passports,’ she grins.
In 2008, Nicole starred in Australia (left) and in 2012's The Paperboy (right) as a woman who swaps sexually explicit letters with a death-row inmate
While she is widely considered one of Australia’s most successful exports, Nicole was actually born in Hawaii, where her father was studying.
Back in their native Australia, however, she was raised from the age of four on Sydney’s upper middle-class North Shore. She can clearly recall her first visits to the cinema with her parents.
‘They used to take me to The Independent Theatre, which was very bohemian, and we would sit on beanbags on the floor.’
She started ballet lessons aged three, and acting classes soon afterwards, ‘because I just wanted to be doing plays’, she says.
‘As I was pale-skinned, I was kept indoors a lot – I couldn’t be running around on the beach with my friends,’ she reveals.
‘But the benefit of that was that I was reading books, building my inner life and concocting ideas in my head.’ (Her skin today is still perfectly alabaster, and she remains cautious about exposure to the sun. While she has been crossing to and fro from her trailer to the cinema this morning, she has been escorted by an assistant shading her with an umbrella.)
She studied acting at the Philip Street Theatre in Sydney – where she met her close friend Naomi Watts – and the esteemed Australian Theatre for Young People, and at 16 made her film debut in a remake of the Australian festive favourite Bush Christmas, followed by roles in BMX Bandits and the soap opera A Country Practice.
‘They’ve got no interest in the play, but huge interest in the meerkats right now,’ Nicole said of her daughters (Faith and Sunday Rose). She is filming an advert with meerkats Aleksandr and Sergei
Her first major international film role came at 23 in the thriller Dead Calm, followed a year later by Days of Thunder, in which she played a doctor who falls in love with a racing driver – played by her future husband Tom Cruise.
In addition to her two younger daughters, Nicole is mother to Isabella, now 23, and Connor, 20, the children she adopted with Tom. Is she different as a mother second time around?
‘When you’re younger, you’re more laissez-faire,’ she muses. ‘When you’re 25, you don’t think things out; you just do them. It’s a spontaneous way of being.’
She and Keith have had to be more deliberate in building their family; they employed the services of a surrogate mother for their younger daughter Faith, born when Nicole was 43.
‘As you get older, you’re aware that time is precious,’ she continues. ‘Everything has to be cherished because that’s the thing you can never buy.
‘That’s why doing something like the play is a big ask,’ she continues. ‘I go, “OK, are we able to do this? Because this is our time, and I’m only going to do it if we can all go.”’
The girls are, Nicole tells me, extremely excited about their three-month spell in London, as is she.
‘London has been so good to me, and I feel very connected to it,’ she says.
‘And I think it’s the best time of year to be there – the crisp cool air, and all the lights going up in the run-up to Christmas. It’s a very magical time.’
With that, she grasps me in a warm, enthusiastic hug and heads back to an afternoon in the company of her new furry friends.
Nicole is starring in Photograph 51 at London’s Noël Coward Theatre until 21 November, noelcowardtheatre.co.uk.
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