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Nicole Kidman

Actress and producer, born June 20, 1967, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Though American-born (her father Anthony, a biochemist and psychologist, was studying in Hawaii), Kidman grew up in Longueville, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, from the time she was four years old. Early on, Anthony and his wife, Janelle, a nursing teacher and devoted feminist, introduced Nicole and her younger sister, Antonia, to the culture of social and political activism.

Kidman’s first experience with acting came when she was six years old and she appeared in her school’s Christmas pageant. She trained in dance, drama, and mime through her teen years, developing a particularly strong passion for ballet. She became a regular performer at Sydney’s Philip Street Theater and in 1983 made her television debut in Bush Christmas, which still airs in Australia each December. In 1985, when she was only 17, members of the Australian Film Institute voted Kidman Actress of the Year for her work in the TV miniseries Vietnam. That same year, Janelle Kidman was diagnosed with breast cancer, and her eldest daughter dropped out of North Sydney High School to concentrate on her family and her acting career.

By the time she made her first American film, 1989’s Dead Calm, Kidman was already a popular star in Australia. Her performance alongside fellow Australian actor Sam Neill won the actress rave reviews and led to a lead role in her next movie, the race-car drama Days of Thunder. Her co-star was Tom Cruise, then most famous for his role as a cocky naval fighter pilot in 1988’s Top Gun. The movie was pure formula, but the chemistry was real: on Christmas Eve, 1990, in Telluride, Colorado, Kidman and Cruise were married after a whirlwind courtship.

Over the next few years, Kidman struggled to prove herself in the media and with the critics as not only “Mrs. Tom Cruise,” but as an actress in her own right. The most striking evidence that she had succeeded in these efforts came in 1995 with her chilling portrayal of the murderous TV reporter Suzanne Maretto in To Die For, directed by Gus van Sant. With starring roles in high-profile movies such as Batman Returns, The Peacemaker, co-starring George Clooney, and Practical Magic, co-starring Sandra Bullock, Kidman cemented her own A-list status.

In the fall of 1998, Kidman took to the London stage in the playwright David Hare’s The Blue Room, a role which she reprised on Broadway in 1999. Her performance—complete with a brief, highly publicized nude scene—earned high praise from critics. Kidman and Cruise spent much of 1997 and 1998 shooting Eyes Wide Shut for the director Stanley Kubrick, who died shortly before finishing the film, which was released in the summer of 1999. The two actors starred in the long-awaited film as a married couple who explores their psychosexual fantasies with strange and potentially devastating results. In 2000, Kidman will keep busy with roles in Birthday Girl and Berlin Diaries. She will also produce and star in In the Cut, which will be directed by the acclaimed Australian filmmaker, Jane Campion, who worked with Kidman on The Portrait of a Lady.

Whatever her own reputation, Kidman remains half of what is arguably Hollywood’s most famous couple. She and Cruise have fiercely and publicly defended the happiness and legitimacy of their marriage and have filed two different lawsuits against tabloid publications for stories they considered libelous. In each case the couple received a large monetary settlement—which they donated to charity—and a published retraction. Kidman and Cruise own homes in Los Angeles, New York, Colorado, and Sydney. They have two adopted children, Isabella and Connor.