Nicole Mary Kidman, AC (born 20 June 1967) is an Australian actress, singer and film producer.
Nicole Kidman’s first acting role was as a sheep in a
school nativity play. She was five years old. By l0 she had
joined an acting school and by 14 she had her first lead role in the Australian
film Bush Christmas. By the time Nicole was 19 the acclaimed Hollywood director
George Miller (Babe, Happy Feet) had written the TV mini-series Vietnam and
Bangkok Hilton for her to star in.
Nicole says she is lucky because she knew from a very
young age that she wanted to build her life around acting. Her
dream has come true.
Nicole was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, to Australian
parents Anthony (a biochemist and clinical psychologist) and Janelle (a nursing
instructor). The Kidman family moved to Sydney when Nicole was
three and she soon developed an early love for ballet, mime and drama. Her
dedication to acting led to Australian Film Industry Award nominations when she
was just 14 (BMX Bandits). She won an AFI Best Actress award at age 17 for the
TV mini-series Vietnam.
Nicole first came to the attention of American
audiences with her critically acclaimed performance in the riveting 1989
psychological thriller Dead Calm. She has since become an
internationally recognized, award-winning actress known for her range and
versatility.
In 2003, Nicole won an
Academy Award, a Golden Globe, a BAFTA Award and a Berlin Silver Bear for her
portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours. (She is the only Australian to win a
Best Actress Oscar.) In 2002, she was honored with her first Oscar nomination
for her performance in the innovative musical, Moulin Rouge! For that role and
her performance in the psychological thriller, The Others, she received dual
2002 Golden Globe nominations and won for Best Actress in a Musical. She was
awarded her first Golden Globe for a pitch-perfect, wickedly funny portrayal of
a woman obsessed with becoming a TV personality at all costs in To Die For,
directed by Gus Van Sant. She has been nominated for Golden Globes three other
times for her performances in Birth (2004), Cold Mountain (2003) and Billy
Bathgate (1991).
She recently completed filming Just Go With It, slated
for release in 2011, opposite Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. She
starred in the film adaptation of the musical Nine with Daniel Day Lewis,
Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Sophia Loren and Kate Hudson. The film
received a SAG nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion
Picture, a BFCA nomination for Best Picture/Best Acting Ensemble and a Golden
Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical. In 2008, Nicole
reunited with her friend, Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann, and fellow
Australian actor Hugh Jackman for Luhrmann’s World War II love story,
Australia. In 2007, Kidman teamed with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black in
Margot at the Wedding, and with Daniel Craig in a screen adaptation of the
fantasy novel, The Golden Compass. She also voiced the role of Norma Jean in
the Academy Award-winning animated musical Happy Feet, which reunited her with
George Miller, the Australian director most responsible for launching her
career. She narrated the Sundance Grand Jury Award and Audience Award-winning
documentary God Grew Tired of Us, and also narrated the film biography of Simon
Wiesenthal entitled I Have Never Forgotten You.
Nicole recently completed
shooting Rabbit Hole, opposite Aaron Eckhart. Rabbit
Hole was developed by Nicole’s Blossom Films production company and was
directed by John Cameron Mitchell. The cast includes Dianne Wiest, Tammy
Blanchard, Sandra Oh, Giancarlo Esposito and Jon Tenney.
Nicole made a highly lauded London stage debut in the
fall of 1998, starring with Iain Glenn in The Blue Room. She
won London’s Evening Standard Award and was nominated for a Laurence Olivier
Award in the Best Actress category. The Blue Room moved to Broadway for a
sold-out, limited run in 1998-99.
Nicole says she is as excited to step onto a film set
today as she was on the day she started her first movie back in Australia. She
believes she is incredibly blessed, not only because she has the career she
dreamed of when she was a schoolgirl but because it has exceeded her wildest
expectations. As an actor she
has been fortunate to travel the world and meet people from so many different
cultures. Her career has given her the opportunity to cultivate an
understanding of how she can best lend her support and make a difference.
In January of 2006, Nicole was awarded Australia’s
highest honor, the Companion in the Order of Australia. She was also named, and
continues to serve, as Goodwill Ambassador of UN Women, the United Nations
Development Fund for Women, whose goals are to foster women’s empowerment and
gender equality, to raise awareness of the infringement on women’s human rights
around the world and to end violence against women.
Nicole serves as an Ambassador of the Sydney
Children’s Hospital, Randwick, and has served as patron of the Australian
Theatre of Young People, which she attended as an aspiring young actor. She is
a UNICEF Ambassador for Australia and, most recently, she voiced her support of
the Women’s Cancer Program at Stanford University with Dr. Jonathan Berek.
Along with her husband, Keith Urban, she helped raise nearly half a million
dollars for the Women’s Cancer Program, a world-renowned center for research
into the causes, treatment, prevention, and eventual cure of women’s cancer.
Award-winning actress, activist and Goodwill
Ambassador, Nicole is above all things a devoted wife and mother. She
is never happier than when she’s spending time with her family. She is married
to country music star Keith Urban and they have a 2 daughters, Sunday Rose,3,
and Faith Margaret, born in December 2010. Nicole has two teenage children,
Isabella and Connor, from her first marriage to Tom Cruise.
