Nicole Kidman: The Princess Bride

Kidman worked steadily during her teen years in a series of low-budget Australian kids' films that, judging from their titles, struck me as possibly educational--if I could find any on tape. But unlike Kevin Costner's early thespic efforts, Kidman's seminal works haven't yet been resurrected for the video exploitation market. I decide to ask her about them anyway, especially the ones not listed in her official studio press bio. "Uh-oh," she says with a grin. "Throwing this stuff at me? My past that I'm trying to get rid of." I remind her that there's no escaping one's past. Now then: BMX Bandits, a flick about kids on bikes, no doubt? "I still get letters on that from little boys who were impressed and want to know if I can actually ride a BMX bike, and I have to write back and tell them I actually had a male stunt double--there was no girl who was a good enough rider." Something called Willis and Burke? "No comment," she says demurely.

Windrider? "No comment." Room to Move? "That was with the director who helped me get my part in the mini-series 'Vietnam.' I was 16." The Bit Part? "No comment" Kidman sighs, then brightens back up. "But I did a lot of work, didn't I? My philosophy was hands on. I wanted to work."

Frankly, I am impressed by the idea of a teenager with a long-range philosophy. "But it's not nudity or violence," she continues. And with each one I did, I got some kind of knowledge and made it into what we all package as experience, or I met somebody that I then had a relationship with." Like the director of Room to Move, she explains, who helped her get a part on "Vietnam," which made her a star in Australia at the age of 16--she was voted Best Actress of the Year in a public poll--and that's what helped catch the eye of Philip Noyce, who was scouting for a lead actress for Dead Calm, the film that caught Robert Benton's eye.

If we go with the editor's Cinderella take on Kidman's story--but isn't it beginning to seem not very clever?--then the fairy godmother will have to be Noyce, a rangy, bearded Australian filmmaker with wild eyes. He cast Kidman, then 19, in his crackerjack thriller, and thereby charted out her destiny. It's really quite a good movie. It takes place almost entirely on two yachts in the middle of the ocean, and has a cast of three: Sam Neill and Kidman play a husband and wife on holiday, and Billy Zane is Hughie the crackpot American who pi-lots his leaking yacht next to theirs and unleashes his young Brando grin and his psychotic fury. When he steals the boat from her husband, Nicole's character must go mano a mano with him and ultimately save the day; she outwits the psycho and saves her career-sailor husband from death on the high seas.

And so, in her first firm released in America, Kidman made arguably the most powerful debut by a 19-year-old actress since Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not. Unfortunately, few people saw the film. But we know Robert Benton saw it. And Tom Cruise saw it, and thought of Kidman for the role of the doctor who patches him up in Days of Thunder (who knows, in retrospect, what else he might have been thinking?).

After her heroics in Dead Calm, Nicole inevitably found herself labelled "The Australian Sigourney Weaver"--not too absurd, considering the physical resemblance. "I heard that I looked like Sigourney," she says, "although I was also told that I looked like Fergie! A cross between Fergie and Sigourney--that baffled me. They want to link you to all these different people. I suppose that's how I get typecast. I get told I can play a strong female. I would like to play a very shattered female. Of course, this next film [the Ron Howard project with Cruise] I'm playing a very feisty, strong-willed woman."

Nicole Kidman is a feisty, strong-willed woman, I've realized by now. She even has a five-year plan. "In the next five years I want to do at least five films, and a play in New York. I don't go to my agent and say this is what I want, this is what I want, this is what I want. I sort of set goals--secretly. I just steel myself. It's how I've operated my whole career. And it's satisfying when you reach your goals, 'cause it's like, wow--gosh, this can actually happen. I really believe in the strength of intention--of making a decision and then following it through. That incredible want that you don't let other people or other situations counteract."

But," I ask, "if you don't let other people know what your goals are, and you seem to keep falling from one good thing into another, then won't some people see your success as luck, or even some kind of fantasy?" (I am thinking of my editor, hunting down glass slippers for the Cinderella photo session with Nicole.)

"Yeah, yeah, there is a certain element of luck," she says, "in the sense that you meet the right person or get the right project at the right time. But relying on luck puts you in a precarious situation. For when does the luck go? So then you have to reevaluate that philosophy and come up with a different one, which is believing in your own strengths, and not putting limits on that."

There is something like fire in Nicole's eyes as she says this, and so I believe her. Not because this is a bold new philosophy. It is, in fact, a familiar one--the Power of Positive Thinking. We are told, all the time these days, of its benefits: "Just Do It." There are even tapes you can order through the mail that will whisper similar messages to you as you sleep, with guaranteed results. No, I believe her simply because there is this fire in her eyes when she says it.

Australian producer George Miller has said, "Nicole is not just someone who's acting for the short term--to become rich and famous and get on the covers of magazines. She's an absolutely serious actor." There are, perhaps unbeknownst to Miller, those magazines which put serious actors on their covers--but only if they're rich and famous too. The first time I saw Nicole Kidman on a cover, she was Tom Cruise's "Mystery Girl" and there was a question mark over her face.

The second time, same magazine, you could see her face, but she was way up in the corner with Cruise, and the cover line read "Tom Cruise's Secret Wedding"--no mention of the bride. Did it hurt to be so anonymous, on this of all days? These are covers she would not have been on for being merely a serious actress. Is this what is meant by the double-edged sword of publicity? In short, I'm sorry Nicole, but what is it like to be married to Tom Cruise?

Nicole is not surprised by this question. She was probably waiting impatiently for me to get around to it. "In the beginning," she begins, "it was a real eye-opener. The thing is, I don't not talk about it. But an interview can turn into an interview about why I married Tom Cruise. I have a great love of what I do and it's very important to me. Sure, I'll answer a few questions, but when the whole interview--and it has happened--is about our relationship, I sound like a broken record. And obviously, I'm doing a film with him, and I'm not going to go, 'Oh, I won't talk about my husband'."

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