Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  Nicole was always hearing the voices of happiness and excitement. They literally surrounded her at school and in her neighborhood, but seldom did she ever feel a part of it and seldom did she ever make an effort to join in with her peers.

  Ballet was her first escape. She took dance lessons and tried to get all the neighborhood fitted in tutus. Then it was mime that grabbed her attention. She became fascinated with a professional mime company that worked the streets of Sydney. Antony was quietly supportive of Nicole’s acting ambitions, but Janelle played an active role in helping her daughter realize her dream of becoming an actress.

  From ballet lessons to mime to acting, Janelle encouraged and supported Nicole’s childhood and adolescent dreams. Nicole was a youth member of St. Martins Theatre in Melbourne, and she tried out for and won roles in community theater productions in Sydney at the Phillip Street Theater and the Australian Theater for Young People.

  “Each weekend I’d go to the theater at Phillip Street,” she told the Australian edition of Rolling Stone. “I used to lock myself in there for the whole weekend. I thought it was fantastic. I’d be teased, ‘cause I’d be going off to the theater instead of going to the beach with the boys and all the girls. I felt like an outsider because of that. But it’s character building not to be a pretty child. You can’t rely on batting your eyes and saying, please can I have this!”

  As a result of her devotion to the theater, she experienced her first kiss, not on the sandy beaches around Sydney and Melbourne, but onstage in front of an audience. She relished that kiss and thought about it constantly when she was not on stage. When she arrived at the theater, all she could think about was the upcoming kiss, how the boy’s lips would feel against hers, and how she would feel inside when she received the kiss.

  Actually, everything she learned about sex in those early years, she learned in the theater. Once, in a production of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, a story about sexual repression in the 1800s, Nicole startled her grandmother, who was sitting in the audience—and perhaps even herself—when she yelled out, as required for the character, “Beat me! Harder! Harder! Harder!” Afterward, to her surprise, her grandmother told her that she quite liked it.

  As a teenager, she appeared in a wide range of stage plays, including Sweet Bird of Youth and The Seagull. After one particularly strong performance at the Philip Street Theater, Nicole received a letter of praise from audience member Jane Campion, who was then a film student.

  Nicole was an avid reader in her teens. When she was not at one of the three theaters that she worked out of, she devoted her time to books. It was only natural that she would try her hand at writing. At the age of thirteen, she entered—and won—a short story competition. Her story was about a young girl who got involved with an older man. Teachers would gasp, she told USA Today, and say things such as “What is this?” and “Who wrote this?” Then they chastised her for venturing into adult themes, she said, “but it always interested me.”

  By the age of fourteen, Nicole had every wannabe actor’s dream—an agent. She fantasized about going to America to become a movie star. Few people encouraged that line of thinking, but they did make her feel that success of some kind was within her grasp, if only in Australia where the competition was not so intense. One of her first offers came from aspiring director Jane Campion, who hired her for a role in a film-school project; nothing came of it because Nicole dropped out because of exams. Champion sent her a postcard that said she hoped to some day direct her in a “classic.”

  After two years of struggling to balance her duties at school with her ambitions to become an actress, Nicole made the first major decision of her life. At the age of sixteen, she decided to drop out of high school and pursue acting full-time. Her mother was supportive of her decision, telling her that she was glad that she had a dream to follow, but her father was not so supportive, feeling that she would regret not getting an education. Neither Nicole nor her father has ever said much publicly about his position on the matter, but whatever his level of opposition he clearly did not stand in her way.

  “I was a nightmare to my parents,” Nicole told Movieline magazine. “I lied to them. There was a time when my mother said, ‘I can’t live in the same house with her.’ It wasn’t all roses. But that also put me in good stead [for the future]. Because I grew up in a family that yelled a lot, I don’t cower [now]. People would lose their tempers in our house, things would be thrown, and an hour later we’d sit around and have a laugh.”

  As Nicole’s dreams of stardom intensified, so did her hormone production. Boys who had scorned her in years past now saw redeeming value in her pale blue eyes and in her long, coltish legs. Nicole responded to the long-awaited attention and fell into her moments of boy craziness. Her first boyfriend was named Doug. He was a surfer and a carpenter and she was especially attracted to his workingman’s hands.

  “I do have a hand fetish,” she told Rolling Stone. “Powerful hands that can be gentle. Oooooh. Girls’ hands I don’t care about. I can appreciate their beauty, but I’m not interested. Men’s hands playing guitar? Watching the hands move on a guitar?”

  Antony and Janelle had what many people would consider an unusual attitude toward Nicole’s dates. Because Janelle was concerned about men who drink and drive, she insisted that Nicole’s dates stay overnight in their home—not in the guest room, mind you, but in Nicole’s bedroom. Of course, the young men were admonished to sleep in a separate bed and behave themselves.

  Antony’s progressive attitudes toward Nicole’s dating habits were confirmed in his writings. “Dating is a valuable source of experience for the adolescent,” he once wrote. “A moderate degree of dating, with serious involvement delayed until late adolescence, appears to be a good pattern . . . For many young adults, moving in with a boyfriend or girlfriend is now seen as yet another stage in the development of a relationship, somewhere between going steady and marriage.”

  Nicole’s romance with Doug lasted about six months; then she moved on and established a new relationship with a boy named Rick. Antony and Janelle watched and waited. They were liberal parents, but their willingness to accommodate Nicole during her trek through adolescence seems to have had little to do with ideology—or even Antony’s professional beliefs as a psychologist. Clearly they did what they did because they loved her and feared losing her during what they correctly perceived to be a confusing time in her life.

  ~ ~ ~

  Dropping out of school put a lot of pressure on Nicole to succeed in her chosen career. As a result, she was tireless in her quest to land a role in a movie. She networked with people who were associated with the theaters—and she went door to door. Mostly, she encountered rejections, but occasionally she received words of support.

  Finally, at the age of sixteen, she got the break she had been hoping for when she was hired to play the role of Helen in the made-for-television movie Bush Christmas (re-titled Prince and The Great Race when it was released in video). Filmed north of New South Wales in Beaudesert Shire, Queensland, it was a Disney-style movie about the adventures of a horse named Prince.

  The plot in this well-crafted film is straightforward. As Christmas approaches, the Thompson family learns it is in danger of losing its farm if it cannot raise the money to pay the mortgage before January 1. Their only hope is to win an upcoming horse race that offers a cash purse. Nicole is one of three children on the farm. In one of the early scenes, before the adventure begins, the entire family goes to a barn-style dance, where an up-tempo country music band named Bushwacker performs.

  Sixteen-year-old Nicole whirls about the dance floor doing a two-step, her bushy, dark hair seemingly out of place in conservative surroundings. The interesting thing about the band is that the lead singer is dressed in a Garth Brooks-style hat and shirt—and he sings in a style that predates Brooks’s music by at least six years. It is not known if Brooks ever saw Bush Christmas, but, if he did not, it is an amazing coincidence that he would devel
op such a similar style.

  Overnight, two horse thieves steal Prince. When they awaken the next morning, Nicole, her two brothers, and an aborigine named Manalpuy go after the horse. It is a classic children’s odyssey, pitting the determined children against the wily horse thieves. At one point they stumble upon a place sacred to the aborigine. Manalpuy pushes her away because it is forbidden to females. He tells her that she must pretend she never saw it. Nicole walks away in a huff, but later apologizes.

  “I’m sorry about your sacred place,” she said. “I didn’t know. Can you forgive me?”

  “I will but my people will not,” he replies solemnly.

  That night, they dine on lizard and insects, and the next morning they celebrate Christmas (thus the title Bush Christmas). They eventually catch up with the thieves and rescue the horse. That done, their task is to get the horse back in time for the race.

  Bush Christmas was not the kind of film that could catapult Nicole into international stardom, but it went over very well in Australia and has since become a Christmas classic, telecast each holiday with the same reverence afforded It’s A Wonderful Life in the United States.

  ~ ~ ~

  Nicole’s second movie role in 1983 was in BMX Bandits. She played the part of Judy, a young girl who gets involved, literally by accident, with a teenage bicycle “gang.” She first appears pushing a grocery cart at the store at which she works. Her first line in the movie is “Hi!” and it is delivered to a chubby male co-worker. She meets the bicycle gang when they accidentally crash into the grocery carts she is gathering. She gets fired as a result and tags along with the guys to see where that takes her.

  At five-foot-ten, sixteen-year-old Nicole has a luminous presence in the film. She was a good three and four inches taller than the boys, even taller than all the adults, with the exception of one or two men who were about her same height. For this role, in which the entire focus was on teens, she wore her kinky hair pulled up on top of her head in the same configuration that had garnered her so much trouble in high school.

  In later years, Nicole often spoke of how awkward and ill at ease she felt as a teen. Those feelings are clearly evident in the film, where the gawky and flat-chested actress sometimes appears to think that her biggest challenge in life is simply to move her body from one place to another. She has said that she felt that she was “ugly” at that age, but clearly that was not the case, for she had a beautiful face that was filled with starry-eyed wonderment. The ugliness in her memories is probably due to the way she felt trying to make her body move with as much grace as her thoughts.

  Shortly after she joins up with the bicycle gang, they discover a cache of hi-tech two-way radios that were meant to be picked up by bank robbers. They sell the radios, one at a time, to other teens with the hope that they will raise enough money for Nicole to purchase a bike of her own.

  Soon it becomes apparent to the teens that the crooks—and a very bad gang of crooks they turn out to be—are hunting them down to recover the radios. They finally catch up with Nicole in a warehouse, where she tries to talk her way out of the situation, then fights her way to freedom. She is more physical in this movie than she was in Bush Christmas. She runs, rides a bike, fights off attackers—everything that your basic sixteen-year-old would do when chased by vicious killers. She is eventually captured again and kidnapped by the dimwitted crooks, an event that puts her in a position to be rescued by the entire Australian biker nation.

  Directed by British-born Brian Trenchard-Smith, who previously had directed Day of the Assassin and The Love Epidemic, BMX Bandits—along with Bush Christmas—made Nicole an instant celebrity among Australia’s youth. She was very quickly signed up to do a series of television programs in 1984, including “Chase Through the Night (movie),” “Matthew and Son (movie),” “Five Mile Creek (series),” and “A Country Practice (series).”

  “Five Mile Creek,” which required her to be in front of a camera five days a week for seven months, probably had the biggest impact on her personal development because it gave her the confidence to take chances and make mistakes without disastrous results.

  When she emerged from her first year as an independent teenage, it was with a sense of confidence. At seventeen, she was famous in Australia, the wunderkind of her generation, and she had her own apartment and her own personal bank account. She also had a relationship with a thirty-seven-year-old man. Perhaps to flex her newfound independence, she undertook the first reckless adventure of her life: she left Australia and went to Amsterdam, Holland with her boyfriend.

  When they arrived in Amsterdam, Nicole decided that she no longer knew how she felt about things (perhaps it was too much closeness on the long flight). “I said, ‘I really think we should just be friends,’” she told Premiere magazine. As can be imagined, that pronouncement did not go over too well with the boyfriend. Asked if her boyfriend went for the new arrangement, she said “No!” and then burst out laughing. “I naively did not understand male sexuality at that age.”

  While in Amsterdam, Nicole went to a flea market and purchased an antique brocaded gown made in the 1930s. She thought it would make a beautiful wedding gown—and so it did several years later. “I thought I was going to marry the guy I was with-—and I didn’t. Thank God . . . ‘Cause I’m sure he says, ‘Thank God’ too. But I knew it was the dress for me.”

  Chapter 2

  NICOLE’S FIRST FLIRTATIONS

  WITH MOVIE SUCCESS

  For decades, Australia has nurtured the story of a legendary racehorse that traveled a long distance, under harsh conditions, to Melbourne to win the year’s biggest race—not once, but twice in consecutive years. With time, the horse became a mythic source of great national pride, so it was perhaps inevitable that someone would offer up a fictionalized account for a motion picture.

  “This is a story that is part of Australian folklore, so I had known about it for a long time,” says director Denny Lawrence, who signed on to do the film Archer (later changed to Archer’s Adventure for release in the United States). “The idea of a horse walking such a long distance and then winning a race by such a margin (and doing it again the next year!) is of course appealing. Australia was a wild frontier still in those days—like the U.S.A.—with outlaws (bushrangers) and many natural obstacles to battle and overcome.”

  Lawrence, one of Australia’s most respected writers and directors—and a former chairman of the Australia Film Institute—says that the main challenge making the film was “slightly fictionalizing the account without betraying the historical fact—and still telling a good dramatic story within the parameters of ‘family viewing’ as well.”

  As Archer’s Adventure begins. Dave, a stable boy played by Brett Climo, talks his employer into allowing him to take Archer on a five-hundred-mile trip to Melbourne to race in the Melbourne Cup. The countryside, while beautiful, is filled with natural dangers and human predators. Brett is robbed of his money on the first day out. On the second day, he comes across a farm, where he asks for food and lodging for himself and his horse, even though he no longer has the money to pay for it.

  While at the farm, he meets a young girl named Catherine (played by Nicole), who is there to visit her uncle. They hit it off almost instantly and by nightfall they find themselves in a romantic setting.

  “You can kiss me if you like,” says Nicole.

  “Are you sure?” he answers, not believing what he heard.

  Nicole turns away, no longer looking at him.

  “No,” she says playfully. “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Too late,” he says and kisses her.

  The next morning they part company, although with an expectation that they will meet again. She tells him he would be welcome to visit her at her parents’ farm on the road to Melbourne. Before they meet again, Brett has an adventure with a married woman who is in the process of burying her child when he rides up to her farm. He builds a coffin for the child and digs the grave. Then he learns that
her husband left home to make money for the family, even though the wife needed him more at the farm. Brett decides to look for the husband when he resumes his journey to Melbourne, so that he can tell the man about the death of his child and how much his wife needs him.

  When Brett rides onto the farm owned by Nicole’s parents, everyone is in the middle of a wedding celebration. Nicole encourages him to put Archer in the barn so that he can dance with her. That night, a herd of wild horses spooks Archer into breaking free and joining the herd. With the help of Nicole’s parents, Brett locates Archer and resumes his journey to Melbourne.

  The entire film was shot on location near Sydney—some of the wilderness locations are today bustling suburbs—but since it was done in the winter, the cast had to wear many different layers of clothing.

  The film was beautifully photographed and the Australian scenery is often spectacular. “The landscape was integral to the story and an allegory as well as a reality,” explains Lawrence. “To go from temperate coastal regions through the mountains (with snow—very strange to the horses needless to say) across the tablelands and interior plains to the river flats of Melbourne, was an epic journey.”

  Nicole did not have a large role in this film, but she was incredibly poised in every scene, becoming the focus even when that was unintended. Lawrence chose her for the role after viewing a sneak preview of BMX Bandits. “I thought she was terrifically exciting and charismatic,” he says. “I then met with her and found her modest and shy in person, with qualities that were essential to a young woman of those times. She was equally appealing to a modern audience I felt; the character required a bit of ‘sass.’ She was also tremendously photogenic.”