Nicole Kidman is in her prime as wife, mother and true-blue Aussie. As Bryce Corbett chats to her about life and love with Keith Urban, their daughter Sunday Rose, and her Oscar-worthy role in Rabbit Hole, he discovers there is still one subject she won’t talk about…
In her new movie Rabbit Hole, Nicole Kidman plays a mother devastated by the accidental death of her four-year-old son. For a good part of the film, the pain being felt by Nicole’s character Becca is internalised. The audience is in no doubt that grief that has torn Becca’s world apart; that she is now confronted with a life she had no clue she would one day have to live and is struggling to find the emotional tools to live it. And yet, she remains contained.
In a climactic scene with her husband, played by Aaron Eckhart, Becca finally cracks. “It feels like maybe I don’t feel badly enough for you!” she wails. “Maybe I’m not feeling enough!” It’s a cry to let her grieve in the manner she chooses. To show that beyond the composure is a heart riven with unimaginable pain, and that while to the outside world she may appear detached and incomprehensibly serene, deep down she is hurting as anyone else in her situation would.
The role – and indeed the film, of which Nicole is a proud producer – is generating serious Oscar buzz. It’s only acting of course, but such is the passion that Nicole has for the film and such was the single-minded determination with which she pursued its realisation, you are left to wonder if it perhaps deals with issues and themes closer to Nicole Kidman’s heart than she could ever say.
Nicole Mary Kidman is sitting opposite me, perched on the edge of a bed in a small suite of the Blue Hotel in Woolloomoolloo, Sydney. A southerly buster is crackling above the cityscape outside the window and cockatoos screech as they dart above treetops in the Royal Botanic Gardens. Up close, she’s strikingly attractive. Yes, the skin on her face is flawless, but not in an apparently fake way. There are smile lines at the corners of her eyes and frown lines on her forehead. She looks like your garden-variety, genetically-blessed, sun-averse, Hollywood megastar.
She’s wearing a figure-hugging dress. The tiny tummy, which has sparked rumours of a pregnancy but which Nicole assures me is not another Urban-Kidman co-production but simply the result of “too many hamburgers” and the Kidman women’s tendency to little tums, is not in evidence today.
Kidman is currently married to country music star Keith Urban and the pair have two daughters, two-year-old Sunday Rose and baby Faith Margaret, who was born to a surrogate on December 27, 2010.
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It’s been 10 years since her decade-long marriage to Tom Cruise came to a sudden end. She now says she was so thrown by the split that she spent years in the relationship wilderness. It was a whole six years after her divorce when fellow Aussie-done-good in America Keith sauntered into her life and asked how her heart was that she was able to reply: “Open”.
“I took a long time to heal, put it that way,” she says now. “I was just very cautious. So when I gave Keith that answer, it was true. For the first time in what had been quite a few years, my heart was open… There were people before who had tried to date me and I was like: ‘No, no, wrong girl.’ I just really wanted to spend time alone so I could heal. And that took me almost six years, which is unusual I know, but that was just how it was. It had to do with me not having anything to give anyone else. I just wanted a family. I’m just the kind of girl who likes to be married.”
Read more of this story in the February issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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Video: Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban announce the birth of their new baby girl, Faith Margaret.
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