The first person Nicole Kidman ever loved and lost
Nicole Kidman burst onto the scene in a flash of talent. At the age of 16, she landed a role in the 1983 Australian holiday favourite, Bush Christmas. A flurry of film and television roles followed, and it wasn’t long before the young actress had secured an American agent.
By the 1990s, she was one of Hollywood’s most talked-about breakout stars, having starred opposite future husband Tom Cruise in the 1990 racetrack romance Days of Thunder and taken home a Golden Globe Award for her performance in 1995’s To Die For. A few years later, in 1999, she began a project with one of cinema’s most revered auteurs, who was then working on what would be his final movie.
Stanley Kubrick required a lot from his actors. During the making of Eyes Wide Shut, Kidman and Cruise disappeared into a long and secretive shoot that saw their marriage put to the test. The shoot took over two years, and Kubrick’s painstaking attention to detail meant that Kidman was required to perform over 100 takes of certain scenes. During her appearance on BBC Radio 4’s This Cultural Life, she explained that she was more than happy to do so: “I would have shot that thing for five years, I didn’t care,” she said, recalling her feelings about working with Kubrick at that time. “I’m with the greatest filmmaker. I’m with my husband. I’ve got my kids there.”
During the project, Kidman became very close to Kubrick, who passed away just a few days after the film’s completion: “Leon [Kubrick’s assistant] said, ‘Stanley Kubrick is dead’. I remember dropping the phone and screaming. That was probably my first encounter with death where it comes and a person you love is taken quickly and it doesn’t seem real. It was horrendous.”
During this period of mourning, Kidman and Cruise’s marriage was the subject of a press free-for-all that saw several rumours spread about the couple’s sex life. Some claimed that their subsequent divorce was the fault of Kubick, but according to Kidman, the director was nothing but supportive. Eyes Wide Shut features a fair few sex scenes and, opening up about the manner in which Kubrick decided to shoot these key moments, Kidman praised the 2001: A Space Odyssey director for his tact. “When I went to work with Stanley Kubrick, he was like, ‘I’m going to want full frontal nudity’, and I was like, ‘Ahh, I don’t know,’” she began.
“So we came up with a great agreement, which was contractual. He would show me the scenes with the nudity before they made it into the film. Then I could feel completely safe. I didn’t say no to any of it. I’d wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to be me standing there nude and everyone laughing at me. would never think of not wanting the storytelling to be told properly,” she concluded. “Having them say, ‘Once you’re OK with it, great, that’s it’ – what a fantastic place to be in as a woman.”
.
