Nicole Kidman: From Courtesan to Punk Queen

On June 20, 1967, the future famous actress Nicole Kidman was born in Hawaii. Since 1983, Kidman has starred in more than 60 films, won an Oscar, three Golden Globes and many other awards. We recalled the main events in the life and career of the actress.

Nicole Kidman was born on June 20, 1967, in Honolulu, the capital of the American state of Hawaii. The actress is considered Australian, although the family returned to Australia only when Nicole was four years old.

As a child, the girl was shy and withdrawn, so her parents sent her to a ballet studio. There, she unexpectedly showed acting talent, and then began to study the history of the theater and attend classes at the youth troupe of the Australian Theater and the Philip Street Theater.

Kidman began acting at the age of 15, in Australia. Her first work was the music video for singer Peta Wilson's Bop Girl. And the 16-year-old actress's debut in cinema was the film "Bike Bandits".

When Nicole was 17, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and the girl could no longer pay for her education at an acting college. Kidman took massage courses and got a job in a massage parlor. She invested her earnings into paying for her mother's treatment and rehabilitation after chemotherapy.

In 1988, Kidman landed the lead role in the TV series Bangkok Hilton.

In 1989, the actress took part in her first Hollywood project - she played the wife of a naval officer in the film "Dead Calm", which was a success in the world box office. After that, she began to be invited to other roles in the USA.

In 1989, on the set of the film Days of Thunder, Kidman met actor Tom Cruise, who became her first husband. Kidman played a female doctor who falls in love with a NASCAR racer played by Cruise and helps him recover from an accident. This was the Australian's first major role, for which she received $200,000.

Before the Pitt-Jolie duo appeared, the couple was considered the most beautiful and loving couple in Hollywood. They adopted two children: Isabella Jane and Connor Anthony.

In 1991, her role as a gangster's mistress in Billy Bathgate earned Kidman her first Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

In 1995, Kidman starred in an uncharacteristic role for independent director Gus Van Sant in the black comedy To Die For.

After the film that introduced Nicole Kidman to Tom Cruise, they starred together in several more films. In 1992, it was the drama Far and Away.

In 1999, Cruise and Kidman starred in Stanley Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut. The couple signed "open" contracts, agreeing to act for as long as Kubrick needed. The erotic film took 400 days to shoot, and was in post-production for another year. The film was released a few months after the director's death.

Shortly after filming for Kubrick, after 10 years together, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman broke up. It is believed that their relationship was damaged by the demands of playing estranged spouses and spending a lot of time naked. Crew members said they noticed tension between Cruise and Kidman early on in the filming, and that as the film progressed, the actors began to quarrel openly.

Journalists assumed that the reason for the divorce could be religious differences between Catholic Kidman and Scientologist Cruise and the terms of their marriage contract, according to which almost everything went to her husband. However, even after the divorce, the actress called Cruise the main love of her life in an interview and stated that the family could have been saved if they had their own children.

In 2001, the year of their divorce, Kidman and Cruise gave interviews for the documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Film, which may be the last film they made together.

There were rumors that Kidman was three months pregnant at the time of the breakup, and that after Cruise left, she had a miscarriage due to stress. For some time, the actress suffered from depression after the divorce and did not act, but then returned to film. In 2001, she played the lead role in the musical Moulin Rouge by Australian director Baz Luhrmann and performed all the vocal parts herself. It is believed that the film revived the forgotten genre of film musicals.

Kidman calls the role of the courtesan Satine the most difficult in her career: during filming, she broke her rib twice. First, the actress was rehearsing a dance in high heels and fell down the stairs, and her partner did not have time to catch her. Then, wanting to look like Vivien Leigh from Gone with the Wind, Kidman asked the costume designer to tighten the corset tighter - and the rib, which had not yet healed, broke again.

That same year, the mystical thriller The Others was released, grossing over $200 million at the box office with a budget of $17 million.

In 2003, Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her role as Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry's The Hours, becoming the first Australian actress to win Best Actress. The actress played a writer suffering from depression and suicidal thoughts, and her striking appearance was specially "ruined" for the role with makeup and a fake nose.

The film, based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name, was one of the most high-profile premieres of 2002. In addition to the Oscar, Kidman received a prize at the Berlin Film Festival, a British Academy Film Award, and a Golden Globe.

In 2003, Kidman starred in the surrealist film Dogville by the controversial director Lars von Trier. At the same time, she spoke about the filming and her difficult relationship with the director in the documentary Dogville Confessions: for the sake of the film, Trier was ready to humiliate the actors and provoke conflicts with them. When the Dane decided to make a sequel to Dogville with the same heroine, Kidman refused to work with him again.

Nicole Kidman on filming with Trier

On Australia Day 2006, Kidman was awarded the Civil Order of Australia, the equivalent of a knighthood in the UK. The actress was joined by Nobel Prize laureates in medicine Barry Marshall and Robin Warren, as well as Finance Minister Ken Henry. Governor-General Michael Jeffery noted Kidman's contributions to film, health care and the fight against cancer.

In 2006, the actress married for the second time - her husband was Australian singer Keith Urban.

With her second husband, the actress managed to give birth to her own child at the age of 41 after many years of infertility. The couple has two daughters: eight-year-old Sunday Rose Kidman-Urban and six-year-old Faith Margaret Kidman-Urban, who was carried by a surrogate mother. For some time, the Australian refused new roles due to her pregnancy.

In 2014, Kidman transformed into Grace Kelly for the critically panned film Grace of Monaco.

In 2016, Garth Davis' drama Lion was released, based on real events: a businessman of Indian descent, adopted by an Australian couple, sets out to find his biological mother 25 years later. The film received six Oscar nominations, including for Best Supporting Actress, played by Nicole Kidman.

Kidman celebrated her 50th birthday with the role of a punk queen in the fantasy drama How to Talk to Girls at Parties based on a novel by Neil Gaiman. The film was presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.

One of the actress's latest transformations is her role in the film "Aquaman", where she played the mother of the main character and the exiled queen of Atlantis.