Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Mike LaSalle said he thought Kilmer’s Bruce Wayne was younger and more handsome than previous Batmen: “You get the feeling most of his problems would be solved if only he got with the right girlfriend. In this case that’s Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman), who is neither ugly enough nor beautiful enough to do Lauren Bacall, but she gives it a good try.”

  Nicole generally got good marks for her performance. Indeed, some observers felt it was her stylish and recklessly seductive effort that rescued the film from falling into a mosh pit of adolescent boy-toys and heavy-metal-level sound effects: Swoosh! Bam! Purr! Compared to the other actors, Nicole seemed almost life-like!

  ~ ~ ~

  At around this same time, Nicole’s acquaintance from acting school, director Jane Champion, told friends in Sydney she wanted to do a film adaptation of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady and was considering Nicole for the lead role as the stubborn but tragicly vulnerable Isabel Archer.

  When word of this reached Nicole, she called Champion and told her that Portrait of a Lady was one of her all-time favorite novels. To Nicole’s disappointment, Champion voiced second-thoughts about the project, saying she had heard that another film company had an adaptation of the novel in the works.

  Nicole was persistent. She told Champion that it did not matter—“They can do theirs and we’ll do ours.” The director was so taken by Nicole’s passion for the project she decided to proceed. She told Nicole that she had the part.

  Nicole was elated, the happiest she had been in a long time. She had always, from day one, considered herself a real actress, not the sort of eye-candy she had become in films such as Batman Forever, My Life, Far and Away, and, yes, even Days of Thunder. Her spirits soaring, she began studying for the part, reading everything she could get her hands on, turning over creative possibilities in her mind.

  Then, while her emotions were at a peak, Champion called her and dropped a bombshell. She had decided that Nicole was not right for the part! Nicole was stunned, as was Tom, who found the way that Champion handled the matter very upsetting.

  Like a rejected lover, Nicole called Champion repeatedly in an effort to restore confidence in her. The tone of the conversations was always, “Can’t we work this out?” Nicole assured her that she had both the passion and the ability to become Isabel Archer. It was a superb acting job, because by then Nicole had begun to question her own abilities.

  Champion told Premiere magazine that she felt “ashamed” about her role in the incident: “I think it just came out of—you know, in the time that Nicole was in Hollywood, she’d made quite a few films I didn’t think suited her, and I don’t think she felt suited her either.”

  Finally, Champion agreed to fly to Los Angeles and allow Nicole to audition for the part she had given her and then taken away. It was an awkward situation for both women. They spent two days together, with Nicole performing scenes from the film and, at times, improvising—and Champion videotaping everything Nicole did. It was a humiliating thing for an actress of Nicole’s experience to do, but she went after the role as if it were her first.

  On the evening of Champion’s last day in Los Angeles, the two women went out on the town to relax, ending up at a rock ‘n’ roll disco where they danced the night away. Before she left town, Champion told her she wanted a week, without telephone calls, to look over the videotape and make her decision. The fact that she did not tell her if she had the role before leaving was unsettling to Nicole, but she had gone too far with the director to be sidetracked by petty insecurities.

  Finally, after she had time to digest the material, Champion called Nicole and told her that she had the part—again! Nicole burst into tears. Champion had put her through hell, had in fact broken her spirit and reassembled it to her own liking, but Nicole was so grateful that she forgave her instantly and promised to give the role everything she had.

  Meanwhile, work on the project, which did not yet have a completed script or secured financing, was affected by a personal tragedy. Champion’s first child, a boy, died soon after birth. Devastated, Champion rebounded by getting pregnant again (this time, she would have a healthy baby girl that she named Alice).

  ~ ~ ~

  When Nicole first read the script for To Die For, she was convinced she was perfect for the part. Based on Joyce Maynard’s novel about a woman who persuades her teenage lover to murder her husband, it is a true story that Maynard, probably best known for her eyebrow-raising relationship as a young woman with reclusive author J. D. Salinger, adapted to her fictional story with great effect.

  The script was written by legendary screenwriter and actor Buck Henry (perhaps best known for writing The Graduate and Catch-22) and ventured into the dramatically treacherous territory of black comedy, a place few actors are comfortable traveling because of the great creative risks involved.

  As if all that was not daunting enough for any actor, the film was going to be directed by Gus Van Sant, best known for off-the-wall films such as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Five Ways to Kill Yourself. One of the few openly gay directors in Hollywood, he played in a rock ‘n’ roll band called Kill All Blondes and recorded solo albums, one of which is titled 18 Songs About Golf. In short, he is a controversial director—his favorite filmmaker is Stanley Kubrick—who likes to push the envelope out past the edge of Hollywood’s comfort level.

  To Die For producers offered the lead role of Suzanne Stone Maretto, the slightly crazed weather girl who thought life would be sweeter without her husband, to Meg Ryan, but she turned it down. When Nicole learned that, she called Van Sant and made her case over the telephone why she would be perfect for the part. She told him that she had never been given an opportunity to play a complex character and she saw Suzanne as the role of a lifetime. Their conversation lasted more than an hour, during which Nicole explained her vision for the character.

  Van Sant listened patiently as she explained that Suzanne was not some totally screwed-up bitch, but rather a woman with incredible savvy who makes some bad decisions. He told her over the telephone that she had the part. He liked the fact that she was not an over-exposed female lead and he liked the passion that she put into her argument that she was perfect for the part.

  Nicole was grateful but stunned with the ease with which he said yes. Van Sant later explained his decision to CNN. “She told me she was destined to play the part of Suzanne Stone . . . and not wanting to stand in the way of destiny, I thought maybe I should give her the part.”

  Exhilarated by her good fortune, Nicole researched the role with obsessive determination. She spent three months studying what she called “American women.” At one point she and Tom checked into a Santa Barbara, California hotel and, living off room service, watched television for three days straight, taking note on what they saw.

  There were only two rules—the television had to be on twenty-four-hours-a-day and no one could leave the room, no matter what. The idea was to soak up everything, and really experience television as a mind-altering influence.

  “I found out that TV deadens you, and it’s hypnotic,” she explained to Time magazine. “I would get involved in the talk shows, yelling back at the screen.”

  By the time Nicole went to Ontario, Canada to begin work on the project, she had become the character in the film. She took a notebook and filled it with exercises to do for each scene. Since the character Suzanne used a hand-held video camera in the movie, Nicole carried one with her as well, learning to edit what she videotaped.

  To the dismay of local residents in Brampton, King City, and Toronto, she got so far into the character—as Billy Zane had done in Dead Calm—that she was unable or unwilling to get out of character. As a result, local residents reported to the media that Nicole Kidman was a flaky, self-centered bitch who was totally without a sense of humanity. Unaffected by criticism of the character, Nicole told Juice magazine: “I actually liked Suzanne. I mean, as sick as that is, she is still a victim of TV and society.”

&
nbsp; Cast opposite Nicole was Mat Dillon, who played the part of Suzanne’s husband, Larry Maretto. As a teen heartthrob, he had won audiences over with his squared-jaw good looks and low-keyed acting style, attributes that were perfect for the role of a pretty-boy husband who lived in ignorance of his wife’s dark impulses. The role of Suzanne’s teenage boyfriend, Jimmy Emmett, was given to Joaquin Phoenix, and the role of her television boss, Ed Grant, was given to Wayne Knight, known to Seinfeld fans as the ever-present postal worker from hell.

  To Die For begins with news coverage of Larry Matetto’s murder. Family members are interviewed and the story is told through their eyes (including Suzanne’s). Each family member gives their opinion of the marriage and the events that changed it.

  At one point, before Larry and Suzanne got married, he tells his sister that Suzanne is like a “volcano,” to which the sister replies, “She can’t even bowl.”

  “She’s so pure and delicate and innocent,” says Larry, “you just love to look at her and you want to take care of her for the rest of your life.”

  When Suzanne and Larry get married, she wears a veil that is identical to the one Maria Shriver wore in her real-life wedding. “You’re not anybody in America unless you’re on TV,” says Suzanne. “On TV is where we learn about who we are.”

  Eventually Suzanne involved three high school students in a documentary for the cable station where she does the weather. Soon she is having sex with Jimmy. After a few encounters, she tells him she can’t do it anymore. “I can’t go home every night and have him trying to touch me, when all the time I’m just thinking about you, about us.”

  One evening, while out with Jimmy, she dances in the headlights to Lynard Skynard’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” her short dress and white panties literally driving him insane. It is one of the visual highlights of the film.

  After Larry is murdered, the family gathers at the house, where Suzanne walks from room to room holding her dog, Walter. At the funeral she turns on a boom box, startling mourners with “All By Myself.”

  After the funeral, Lydia, a teenage girl who was involved in planning the murder, shows up at Suzanne's house and says she wants to talk.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “What we’re going to do,” says the frightened teen.

  “We?”

  “You and me and Jimmy—I’m scared.”

  Suzanne tells her to stay away from her house. “Don’t you ever watch Mystery Theater or anything?”

  Nicole’s best lines in the film occur after the teens’ arrest, when she is telling her story to her own video camera: “As you can imagine, I was shocked beyond comprehension. To think that these disadvantaged youngsters, who I had taken under my wing and would only stand to ultimately benefit from my media savvy—to think they might be responsible for this heinous crime. It simply boggles one with disbelief. Of course, I realized—and I hope this doesn’t sound callous—that the up side to having justice prevail is I would have in my documentary an extremely marketable commodity, something that even PBS would take an interest in."

  When the film wrapped, Nicole felt better about To Die For than any others she had made. She felt she had come to understand Suzanne better than any character she had ever played. “Here’s a woman who’s ambitious, but who ends up going down the wrong track,” she told the Atlanta Constitution. “There are a lot of things in the movie that show you Suzanne is a victim. Of television, certainly. She grew up in a generation that just watched television, and had her morals dictated by TV’s moral code. Then, within that, she’s a woman who has to pursue whatever she has to get where she wants to get. In that sense, I see her as very much a victim. Obviously, audiences will make judgments on it differently, but I had to approach it from that way.”

  The only reservation she had about the part was a fear that people would think that Suzanne was the real Nicole Kidman. It was a risk she felt she had to take.

  In March 1995, Nicole took Isabella—she was now being called simply Bella—and Connor to be with Tom in Prague, where he was filming Mission: Impossible, then on to London, where they set up housekeeping in an enormous four-story house they reportedly rented for $15,000 a week.

  Based on the successful television series, Mission: Impossible, the film is about an American agent who is under false suspicion and disloyalty and must expose the real spy without the help of the American government. It co-starred Jon Voight, Henry Czerny, Jean Reno, and Vanessa Redgrave, and it was directed by Brian De Palma, best known for his work with Carrie (1976) and The Untouchables (1987).

  In May 1995, Nicole left their London home to fly to Cannes to attend the film festival and to promote To Die For. Wearing a revealing dress that was slit almost to her hip, she made a big splash at the festival. For the first time since her marriage, no one asked her about Tom, who obviously had not made the trip with her; everyone was much more interested in her new film than in her marriage and that suited her just fine.

  When To Die For was released in September 1995, reviewers were lavish in their praise of the movie and Nicole’s acting abilities. Wrote David Ansen in Newsweek: “Those who know Kidman only from her one-dimensional roles in Far and Away and Batman Forever are in for a treat: she’s a smashing comedienne. The movie wouldn’t work if Kidman overplayed her hand, condescending to the role. But she invests Suzanne with a deliciously self-deluded conviction, a cheerleader’s witchy mixture of genuine naiveté, calculated sexuality and lethal cunning. She’s a hoot.”

  Under the headline KIDMAN MONSTROUSLY GOOD IN ‘TO DIE FOR’, Mich LaSalle wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle: “Suzanne is a monster, and a lesser actress might have played her on one note. But Kidman brings to the role layers of meaning, intention and impulse. Telling her story in close-up—as she does throughout the film—Kidman lets you see the calculation, the wheels turning, the transparent efforts to charm that succeed in charming all the same. Kidman has always been pretty, but in To Die For, her beauty and magnetism are electric.”

  Roger Ebert, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, thought the film was filled with perfect character studies. “To Die For is the kind of movie that’s merciless with its characters, and Kidman is superb at making Suzanne into someone who is not only stupid, vain and egomaniacal, but also vulnerably human. She represents, on a large scale, feelings we have all had in smaller and sneakier ways. She simply lacks skill in concealing them.”

  To Die For took in $21 million in the United States, with negligible world sales except in Great Britain and France, where the film was a modest success. By contrast, Mission: Impossible proved to be an enormous success when it was released in 1996, taking in $180 million in the United States and $422 Million worldwide.

  For the remainder of 1995, Nicole basked in the glow of praise for her work in To Die For, taking in a best actress award from the Boston Society of Film Critics. She also started work on a new film that had caused her great anguish in the beginning, but now offered her hope for a new direction as a serious actress.

  Portrait of a Lady began production in London in late summer and then moved on to Rome, Florence and Tuscany in September. Joining Nicole was a stellar cast of character actors: John Malkovich as Gilbert Osmond, Barbara Hershey as Madame Serena Merle, Mary-Louis Parker as Henrietta Stackpole, Shelley Duvall as Countess Gemini, John Gielgud as Mr. Touchett, and Shelley Winters as Mrs. Touchett. It was the kind of cast and story that Nicole had dreamed about for years.

  So that she could focus on the film, she left the children with Tom in London for the first week or so. So that she could feel the pain of being Isabel Archer—a turn-of-the-century heiress who rejects the attention of several appropriate suitors only to fall in love with an abusive scoundrel played by Malkovich—she wore a corset that squeezed her waist in to a mere nineteen inches. Asked to explain, she said it was because she wanted to feel the pain that Isabel felt. At one point, Champion had to stop filming when she noticed Nicole turning pale from the over-tightened
corset.

  Through filming, Nicole played close attention to every detail, including her own makeup—she insisted on looking as plain and unassuming as possible. Occasionally, the pressure she put on herself to excel overflowed onto the set in a disruptive manner.

  One day, Martin Donovan was playing opposite Nicole in the stable scene when he noticed that she was walking around with a rather glassy look in her eyes. It was a difficult scene for both actors and drained their emotions. After hours of shooting and re-shooting, they were almost ready to wrap the scene when Donovan looked over and saw Nicole being carried off the set. She had collapsed from exhaustion.

  Champion found Nicole’s fastidiousness exasperating at times, but she was also dazzled by the results. “I always thought that, somewhere inside me, I was always best for the part,” Champion told Premiere. “Until about halfway through, when Nicole started doing stuff I couldn’t even imagine. She was surprising me and surprising herself. And that’s what I wanted for Isabel—to be surprised.”

  The Portrait of a Lady begins as Isabel Archer, an American who is without a father or a mother, goes to England to visit her wealthy uncle, Mr. Touchett. He had encouraged a suitor that he thought would be a good match for her, but the headstrong Isabel had turned down his proposal: “I know it seems tasteless, ungrateful. But I can’t marry him.”

  Responds Mr. Touchett, “You didn’t find his proposal sufficiently attractive?”

  “It was attractive. There was a moment when I would have given my little finger to say yes. But . . . I think I have to begin by getting a general impression of life . . . and there’s a light that has to dawn.”

  To Isabel’s surprise, her uncle dies and leaves her his vast estate. As she moves about society in an effort to find herself, she is introduced to Gilbert Osmond, for whom she develops an overpowering infatuation. Her cousin, Ralph Touchett, warns her about the man, but she refuses to listen. Says Isabel: “He has the gentlest, kindest, lightest spirit. You’ve got hold of a false idea. It’s a pity, but I can’t help it.”