Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life

by James L. Dickerson

  Not long after she marries Osmond, Isabel’s life spirals out of control. Much of the movie revolves around a diabolical plot by Osmond and his friend, Madame Serena Merle, to use Isabel’s money and her past relationship with Lord Warburton (her former suitor) to entice him into marrying their love child.

  When the Lord leaves the city without proposing marriage, Osmond and Isabel fight over the matter and he slaps her and pushes her to the floor. Subsequently, the child is sent to a convent by her father out of spite and Isabel goes to America to be with her dying cousin. Nicole has a brief nude scene in the movie, but the story is curiously devoid of overt sexuality, perhaps because of Champion’s feminist approach to the adaptation.

  After production was wrapped up in November, Champion returned to Sydney to edit the film. Nicole and Tom went back to London, where she collapsed. Exhausted, she remained in bed for two weeks, her temperature going as high as 104 degrees. Tom freaked out while trying to locate the Tyenol in their medicine cabinet and she had to remind him that he was supposed to be calming her down.

  “I was so angry with myself for getting so sick, just sheer emotionally and physically exhausted, and then I saw the film and thought, ‘No wonder,’” she told the Boston Globe. “The workload was more than I realized . . . I drove myself. My desire to please Jane and not have her disappointed was so strong, I wanted to live up to her expectations.”

  Once she recovered, she went to Sydney to put the final touches on the film. By that point, Champion was focusing on overdubbing those portions of the film where the sound quality suffered as a result of unanticipated noise, such as from swishing dresses. Nicole proved to be very demanding, often asking to re-record parts over and over again.

  Champion took Nicole’s perfectionism in stride, for by the time she looked over what they had filmed she was convinced they had made a great movie. Going into the project, she was skeptical she would ever cry over anything Nicole did, but at this stage of the project she could not watch portions of the film without weeping.

  Nicole felt the same way. Shortly before Portrait of a Lady was released, Nicole told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “This film means more to me than any other film I’ve made. And I know it does to Jane, too. Some films you make which you can walk away from. This is one we’re very protective of. We’re out there feeling that we have to shield the baby. Protect the baby!”

  ~ ~ ~

  With the arrival of 1996, Nicole won best actress or best performances awards from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, and the Golden Globes for her work in To Die For. To the surprise of everyone, she was not even nominated for an Academy Award. The Oscar for best actress in 1995 went to Susan Sarandon for her performance in the formula drama, Dead Man Walking. Nicole learned the hard way that the Academy is reluctant to give Oscars to character actors, preferring instead to focus on box-office savvy “movie stars.”

  Once Nicole finished work on Portrait of a Lady, Tom began work on his next movie, a comedy/drama titled Jerry Maguire. Tom plays a gung-ho sports agent, Jerry Maguire, who has a moral epiphany over his firm’s greedy business practices. When he expresses a desire to do the right thing by his clients, he is promptly fired.

  The only client that stays with him is National Football League wide receiver Rod Tidwell, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. Rounding out the cast was Renee Zellweger, who plays Dorothy Boyd, an idealistic woman that leaves a secure job to take a position as Maguire’s entire office staff, and soon becomes his love interest as well.

  Most of Jerry Maguire was filmed in California, which meant that Nicole and the children could be with Tom at their Los Angeles home. They tried to maintain a rhythm in their careers, for the sake of the children, so that they were never making films at the same time. Both Tom and Nicole had become very family-oriented, dotting over their children like any other parents. The more time Nicole spent with Isabella and Connor, the more appreciative she became of their talents and idiosyncrasies. She wanted Isabella to learn to play the guitar, but the child showed no interest in it. Connor, to Nicole’s surprise, took to the instrument right away. Planning a child’s future was more difficult than it looked, she discovered—especially when the child has a mind of his or her own.

  In the summer of 1996, once Tom wrapped up work on Jerry Maguire, they took the children to the Mediterranean island of Capri, where they set up house aboard a 247-foot sailing boat. Early one morning, Nicole was on deck with Connor in her arms, when he began chanting, “Boat, burning, boat burning.” Sure enough, there was a boat burning on the horizon (shades of Dead Calm?)

  At Nicole’s urging, Tom went to rescue the boat’s five passengers. It was his third act of heroism in six months. Previously, he assisted a hit-and-run victim in California and saved two children from being crushed in a London crowd. He was beginning to feel a little bit like Batman or Superman. Needless to say, Conner was mightily impressed.

  Not long after that, Nicole had an adventure of her own. She decided to explore Stromboli, an active volcano off the Italian coast. Wearing chinos and sneakers, she set out with a guide, who apparently got them lost before nightfall. The guide went for help, leaving Nicole stranded on a mountaintop with an injured foot.

  It was 3 a.m. before an aircraft was able to locate her and send skydivers down to save her. Her rescuers took her to a nearby yacht, from which she radioed her frantic husband. When Tom arrived at the yacht, Nicole looked bruised and bedraggled, but she was otherwise in good shape. Before leaving the yacht, Nicole insisted that Tom have coffee with the boat owner, so as not to hurt his feelings. Tom thought it strange, but he accepted the coffee and gulped it down, then made for a hasty exit with Nicole in tow.

  That same month—yes, it was an eventful summer for the Kidman-Cruise household—German audiences reacted with hostility toward the opening of Mission: Impossible. The protest occurred because of Tom’s membership in the Church of Scientology. In Germany, the religion is considered an insidious cult. In Hamburg, where Scientologists have their German headquarters, the city maintains a full-time investigative agency, whose sole purpose is to keep tabs on Scientologists. Its investigators are so fearful of the organization, according to reports in the Philadelphia Inquirer, that they work behind bulletproof glass in a well-guarded building.

  As the protests reached a fever pitch—and politicians urged an outright ban on Scientology—German authorities put some distance between them and the protesters. “We haven’t been able to prove that Scientologists ask its members to commit crimes,” a prosecutor told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “About all I can say about Scientology is that I’m glad my kids aren’t members, but as far as criminal law goes, we don’t have anything against them.”

  The protests were not the only problem Tom had with Germany. The German magazine Bunte published a story that alleged that Tom could not have children because his sperm count was too low. Tom countered with a $60 million defamation lawsuit. Within two weeks, the magazine issued a statement apologizing for the allegations: “Bunte has been informed that Tom Cruise is not infertile and that his sperm count is completely normal. Bunte apologizes to Tom Cruise and his family for this embarrassing and irritating incident.” The publisher blamed the mistake on a writer that it promised would never work for the magazine again. Satisfied, Tom dropped the lawsuit.

  In December 1996, after what seemed an eternity to Nicole, Portrait of a Lady was released. The reviews were harsh. Under a headline that read, "An Unflattering Portrait," Washington Post writer Desson Howe wrote that his opinion of the movie had remained unchanged after two viewings—the acting was solid, but the overall film was lacking in energy: “Portrait feels like an elegant party, full of attractive people, beautiful finery and tremendous music, yet no excitement. And no matter how many times you revisit the place, it never gets better.”

  Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan, offered his opinion that “Though Portrait’s satisfactions don�
��t have much to do with surprise, the argument could be made that the performances of the two leads could use some fine-tuning. Kidman is the picture of clarity, purpose and single-minded intelligence as Isabel, but also colder than she perhaps needs to be.”

  Barbara Shulgasser, movie critic for the San Francisco Examiner, described the film as a romantic horror story. “We never have even a suggestion of what so many men find irresistible about Isabel,” she wrote. “Here, Kidman’s uncanny resemblance to Elizabeth Montgomery in “Bewitched” makes taking her seriously a real chore.”

  Nicole hardly deserved the criticism she received. If she had offered a more glamorous Isabel, she would have been castigated for fluffing up the role. And what does “Bewitched” have to do with all the hard work she put into the role?

  Of course, Nicole did have her admirers. David Sterritt, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, declared her performance first-rate: “Nicole Kidman, quickly becoming one of her generation’s most versatile actresses, gives Isabel a blend of high intentions and unshakable naiveté that James might well have applauded.”

  The same month that Portrait of a Lady was released, bringing in only $134,805 on opening weekend, Jerry Maguire was released with an opening weekend take of $17 million. Turan, the same critic who was less than enthusiastic about Portrait of a Lady, was much more generous to Tom’s movie. Wrote Turan: “As loved by the camera as any actor of his generation, Cruise starts with the familiar but expands to show his character in extremis, with the self-confident grin pushed to the cracking point.”

  Nicole took the slam-dunk competition with good grace, but she would surely have been forgiven if she wondered why she sometimes bothered to get out of bed.

  ~ ~ ~

  Nicole’s next film, The Leading Man, is hardly ever mentioned in her press biographies, primarily because she played only a small role, but also because it is an “arty” film that deals, among other things, with interracial romance.

  Nicole agreed to appear in the film because she had worked in the early 1990s with Australian director John Duigan on Flirting—and she was loath to say no to any Australian filmmaker, for who knew when the American bubble could burst?—and because she had worked on the same film with black actress Thandie Newton, for whom she had a lot of respect.

  The Leading Man takes place in modern-day London and is about a successful English playwright, Felix Webb (played by Lambert Newton) who has a new play, The Hit Man, in rehearsal. Everything is going well in his life, except for his personal life. He is in love with Hilary Rule (played by Thandie Newton), the star of his play, a complication since he is married to Elena (played by Anna Galiena), whom he loves as well. His solution is to ask his leading man, Robin Grange (played by ex-rocker Jon Bon Jovi) to seduce his wife as a means of taking pressure off of him. Elena knows about Felix’s affair with Hilary and has been tormenting him with passive-aggressive acts such as butchering his hair while he is asleep and cutting his neckties in half when he is away.

  This was not Jon Bon Jovi’s first film—he played himself in The Return of Bruno, a painter in Moonlight and Valentino, and a prison inmate who gets shot in Young Guns II—but it was his first attempt at a leading role and he handled it remarkably well.

  Thandie Newton had made five films since co-starring with Nicole in Flirting—among them, Jefferson in Paris and Interview with the Vampire, with Tom Cruise—and had made quite a name for herself. One critic saw Audrey Hepburn-like qualities in her appearance and gestures. Certainly, director John Duigan would have agreed, for he had long been linked romantically with Newton.

  In the film, when Newton’s Robin won an Oscar for best actress, it was Nicole who presented it to her. It was Nicole’s only involvement in the film and her dialogue consisted of five lines. How ironic that Oscar-hungry Nicole would present a pretend Oscar to Newton, who was making a name for herself as a serious actress!

  The Leading Man was first shown in September 1996 at the Toronto Film Festival, but it was not released until May 1997 in Australia and in March 1998 in the United States. Duigan was slow to line up international distributors for the film, but whether that was due to its interracial subject matter or because it has a thoughtful, slow-moving pace is unknown.

  American reviews were generally good. Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas described it as a “handsome, polished effort” and a “sly, traditional-style delight.” Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert enjoyed the film, but felt the climax was lacking. “Hitchock, having brought the gun and the matching love triangles onstage, would have delivered. Still, Duigan keeps us interested right up to the overwrought final developments, and his portrait of the London theater world is wry and perceptive.”

  London Standard critic Alexander Walker thought the film was not British enough. “Indeed, there’s the feeling of a foreign hand somewhere in the whole set-up: as if it had all been done on studio sets in Paris," he wrote. “Not so much a Europudding event, more a Eurostar excursion.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Early 1997 was filled with ups and downs for Nicole. Word had trickled out that Tom and Nicole’s second child, Connor, had African-American parents! That did not go down too well with many people. Why would America’s most glamorous Hollywood couple adopt a black child? The feedback they got over the adoption was not always supportive. Once, while walking on the streets of London with Connor, they were subjected to hurtful racial epithets.

  Nicole never explained their reasons for adopting a black child, other than saying, “it was our choice.” She has steadfastly refused to answer questions about the children’s birth mothers or to give details about the adoptions. “I don’t want them, when they’re older, reading stuff that I’ve said, or their father’s said, and have them say, ‘What is this?’” she explained to Australia’s Good Weekend. “I think it’s really important for them to define themselves before we define who they are.”

  Nicole’s expectations as a parent were still evolving at this point, but one thing she had decided most emphatically and that was that she hoped the children would be able to be educated in both Australia and America. She was not sure yet how that would be possible, with their careers the way they were, but it was her dream for the children.

  Nicole battled more press reports about Tom’s alleged homosexuality—it was beginning to get, oh, so tiring to her—and she waxed eloquently about her marriage, saying that she and Tom were closer than she ever imagined would be possible.

  Lately, she had found herself becoming a worrier, something she had never done until they adopted the children. She worried about the children, about whether they were healthy and happy, and whether their needs were being met. And she worried about Tom, about whether his airplanes would crash or some other disaster would take place.

  Oddly, despite the worrying, she was beginning to sleep somewhat better. For years, she had had a difficult time sleeping through the night. Why she would sleep better now that she had children, with more stuff to worry about, baffled her. On a slow day, she might worry about why she was not worrying about sleeping better.

  It was during this time that she withdrew earlier pronouncements that she was a Scientologist. Although Tom remained a member, she said she was just “who I am”—a mixture of religious influences. She credited her parents, Janelle and Antony, for shaping her into the person she had become. She made it clear that Tom did his thing and she did her own thing. She had nothing negative to say about Scientology; she simply put distance between her and the organization.

  When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences announced its Oscar nominations for 1996, Nicole was disappointed that she was not included for her work in Portrait of a Lady, but she was delighted that Tom’s Jerry Maguire received five nominations, including one for best actor. Five nominations were impressive, but not so impressive as the seven nominations that went to Fargo and Shine.

  Nicole and Tom attended the ceremony together—and Nicole served as a presenter, something that was alw
ays difficult for her because of her shyness—but unfortunately they left empty-handed. In the best actor category, Tom was passed over for Geoffrey Rush for his portrayal of an Australian concert pianist in Shine. The award for best actress went to Frances McDormand for her role in Fargo. The only award that Jerry Maguire received was the one for best supporting actor that Cuba Gooding, Jr. received. The big winner of the evening was The English Patient, which took home nine Oscars, the most since The Last Emperor won nine awards in 1987.

  ~ ~ ~

  Nicole’s next movie was The Peacemaker, a suspense story about an American Army colonel, played by George Clooney, and his boss, a nuclear scientist played by Nicole, who must track down stolen Russian nuclear weapons before they are used by terrorists to strike against an American target.

  When the film was announced, people were shocked to see Nicole in another slick Hollywood role. Months earlier she had made a big deal about wanting to play only interesting and complex women in independent films. Now she was again playing a one-dimensional “girlfriend” role in another would-be blockbuster, though she would probably argue that her character was a scientist and not the girlfriend. She never explained why she did it. One reason may have been because it was the first feature film for director, Mimi Leder, who had built a splendid television career with series such as “ER,” and “L. A. Law”—leaving observers to ponder the mystery of the woman herself. Nicole was not, strictly speaking a hard-core feminist, but she did have a preference for working with strong, creative women like her mother.

  The Peacemaker begins with an assassination, after which occurs a train wreck from which nuclear devices are stolen for sinister purposes. Nicole, who plays scientist Julia Kelly, head of the White House Nuclear Smuggling Group, makes her first appearance in the film in a one-piece swimsuit, when she is summoned from a swimming pool to deal with the potentially disastrous situation.