She’s beautiful yes – but in the remote slightly intellectual way of a Brancusi sculpture or a Modigliani portrait
She’s beautiful, yes – but in the remote, slightly intellectual way of a Brancusi sculpture, or a Modigliani portrait. She’s not sexy, and when she’s been cast as a seductress, the result has fallen flat. Moulin Rouge, admittedly, is such a barrage of rapid edits that it’s impossible to decipher a coherent performance from anyone. And while she holds the screen effortlessly – the camera loves her – as an actor, her range seems rather limited.Not for nothing, I think, is her best performance as Grace in Alejandro Amenabar’s The Others: she does sexual hysteria better than anyone since Deborah Kerr. Like Kerr, she’s intelligent, wary and refined – but she’s also brittle, tightly wound, and these qualities militate against her image as a pin-up.
The star’s public persona – their celebrity – comes at first to overshadow, and eventually to render irrelevant their ability as an actor. Great as they were, Bogart was always fundamentally Bogart; Brando always Brando. Kidman, with her evident love of publicity, her undeniable ambition (and let’s face it, she is Suzanne Stone of To Die For), is in danger of having this happen to her. But with stardom, of course, comes a necessary layer of obfuscation. That film has been waiting for a decade to be made, and Kidman’s commitment is what finally got it done. Stardom can do that.Dear David,You’re correct to identify Nicole Kidman as a star: she is – and one of the very few, moreover, left in the Hollywood firmament.Pale, brilliantly luminescent, and with the deep, peculiar gravity of a sun, drawing whole clusters of willing satellites (financing, directors, co-stars) into her orbit.
They want her to go on doing unusual things – such as Fur, the forthcoming biopic about the photographer Diane Arbus. So I saw a big question: will she fade away, or is she the best bet to become another Meryl Streep, or even Katharine Hepburn?I don’t know the answer to that question, but I know enough about the movie world to be able to weigh the question Does it matter? I think so, because people like her. She’s proved she’s a good actress, but she’s also like Suzanne Stone, the character she played in To Die For (1995) – a woman in love with the idea of celebrity. She loves being on camera.That’s what made me want to write about her. But I knew as I did the book that she is coming up on 40, and we all know the barrier that age is for movie actresses. But at the same time she loves glamour, photo-shoots, flirting with the camera. And she has this fascinating split nature: she’ll take on Virginia Woolf (The Hours) and she’ll do Dogville.
Not everything succeeded maybe, but she was her own woman making her career: Birthday Girl (2001), The Others (2001), Moulin Rouge (2001), The Hours (2002), Dogville (2003). Very tall and thin, she’s a clothes horse; but above all, she has a presence It’s in her skin So bright – like polished china. And for some years now she’s had the confidence to go with it. For good and ill, people care what happens to her, and there’s respect for her because of the journey she’s made Once, she was Tom Cruise’s girl, a beneficiary of his power.