Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (15 page)

The Portrait of a Lady
begins as Isabel Archer, an American who is without a father or a mother, goes to England to visit her wealthy uncle, Mr. Touchett. He had encouraged a suitor that he thought would be a good match for her, but the headstrong Isabel had turned down his proposal: “I know it seems tasteless, ungrateful. But I can’t marry him.”

Responds Mr. Touchett, “You didn’t find his proposal sufficiently attractive?”

“It was attractive. There was a moment when I would have given my little finger to say yes. But . . . I think I have to begin by getting a general impression of life .  .  . and there’s a light that has to dawn.”

To Isabel’s surprise, her uncle dies and leaves her his vast estate. As she moves about society in an effort to find herself, she is introduced to Gilbert Osmond, for whom she develops an overpowering infatuation. Her cousin, Ralph Touchett, warns her about the man, but she refuses to listen. Says Isabel: “He has the gentlest, kindest, lightest spirit. You’ve got hold of a false idea. It’s a pity, but I can’t help it.”

Not long after she marries Osmond, Isabel’s life spirals out of control. Much of the movie revolves around a diabolical plot by Osmond and his friend, Madame Serena Merle, to use Isabel’s money and her past relationship with Lord Warburton (her former suitor) to entice him into marrying their love child.

When the Lord leaves the city without proposing marriage, Osmond and Isabel fight over the matter and he slaps her and pushes her to the floor. Subsequently, the child is sent to a convent by her father out of spite and Isabel goes to America to be with her dying cousin. Nicole has a brief nude scene in the movie, but the story is curiously devoid of overt sexuality, perhaps because of Champion’s feminist approach to the adaptation.        

After production was wrapped up in November, Champion returned to Sydney to edit the film. Nicole and Tom went back to London, where she collapsed. Exhausted, she remained in bed for two weeks, her temperature going as high as 104 degrees. Tom freaked out while trying to locate the Tyenol in their medicine cabinet and she had to remind him that he was supposed to be calming her down.

“I was so angry with myself for getting so sick, just sheer emotionally and physically exhausted, and then I saw the film and thought, ‘No wonder,’” she told the
Boston Globe
. “The workload was more than I realized . . . I drove myself. My desire to please Jane and not have her disappointed was so strong, I wanted to live up to her expectations.”

Once she recovered, she went to Sydney to put the final touches on the film. By that point, Champion was focusing on overdubbing those portions of the film where the sound quality suffered as a result of unanticipated noise, such as from swishing dresses. Nicole proved to be very demanding, often asking to re-record parts over and over again.

Champion took Nicole’s perfectionism in stride, for by the time she looked over what they had filmed she was convinced they had made a great movie. Going into the project, she was skeptical she would ever cry over anything Nicole did, but at this stage of the project she could not watch portions of the film without weeping.

Nicole felt the same way. Shortly before
Portrait of a Lady
was released, Nicole told the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
“This film means more to me than any other film I’ve made. And I know it does to Jane, too. Some films you make which you can walk away from. This is one we’re very protective of. We’re out there feeling that we have to shield the baby. Protect the baby!”

~ ~ ~
   
 

With the arrival of 1996, Nicole won best actress or best performances awards from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the Southeastern Film Critics Association, and the Golden Globes for her work in
To Die For
. To the surprise of everyone, she was not even nominated for an Academy Award. The Oscar for best actress in 1995 went to Susan Sarandon for her performance in the formula drama,
Dead Man Walking.
Nicole learned the hard way that the Academy is reluctant to give Oscars to character actors, preferring instead to focus on box-office savvy “movie stars.”

Once Nicole finished work on
Portrait of a Lady
, Tom began work on his next movie, a comedy/drama titled
Jerry Maguire.
Tom plays a gung-ho sports agent, Jerry Maguire, who has a moral epiphany over his firm’s greedy business practices. When he expresses a desire to do the right thing by his clients, he is promptly fired.

The only client that stays with him is National Football League wide receiver Rod Tidwell, played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. Rounding out the cast was Renee Zellweger, who plays Dorothy Boyd, an idealistic woman that leaves a secure job to take a position as Maguire’s entire office staff, and soon becomes his love interest as well.

 Most of
Jerry Maguire
was filmed in California, which meant that Nicole and the children could be with Tom at their Los Angeles home. They tried to maintain a rhythm in their careers, for the sake of the children, so that they were never making films at the same time. Both Tom and Nicole had become very family-oriented, dotting over their children like any other parents. The more time Nicole spent with Isabella and Connor, the more appreciative she became of their talents and idiosyncrasies. She wanted Isabella to learn to play the guitar, but the child showed no interest in it. Connor, to Nicole’s surprise, took to the instrument right away. Planning a child’s future was more difficult than it looked, she discovered—especially when the child has a mind of his or her own.

In the summer of 1996, once Tom wrapped up work on
Jerry Maguire
, they took the children to the Mediterranean island of Capri, where they set up house aboard a 247-foot sailing boat. Early one morning, Nicole was on deck with Connor in her arms, when he began chanting, “Boat, burning, boat burning.” Sure enough, there was a boat burning on the horizon (shades of
Dead Calm
?)

At Nicole’s urging, Tom went to rescue the boat’s five passengers. It was his third act of heroism in six months. Previously, he assisted a hit-and-run victim in California and saved two children from being crushed in a London crowd. He was beginning to feel a little bit like Batman or Superman.  Needless to say, Conner was mightily impressed.

Not long after that, Nicole had an adventure of her own. She decided to explore Stromboli, an active volcano off the Italian coast. Wearing chinos and sneakers, she set out with a guide, who apparently got them lost before nightfall. The guide went for help, leaving Nicole stranded on a mountaintop with an injured foot.

It was 3 a.m. before an aircraft was able to locate her and send skydivers down to save her. Her rescuers took her to a nearby yacht, from which she radioed her frantic husband. When Tom arrived at the yacht, Nicole looked bruised and bedraggled, but she was otherwise in good shape. Before leaving the yacht, Nicole insisted that Tom have coffee with the boat owner, so as not to hurt his feelings. Tom thought it strange, but he accepted the coffee and gulped it down, then made for a hasty exit with Nicole in tow.

 That same month—yes, it was an eventful summer for the Kidman-Cruise household—German audiences reacted with hostility toward the opening of
Mission: Impossible
. The protest occurred because of Tom’s membership in the Church of Scientology. In Germany, the religion is considered an insidious cult. In Hamburg, where Scientologists have their German headquarters, the city maintains a full-time investigative agency, whose sole purpose is to keep tabs on Scientologists. Its investigators are so fearful of the organization, according to reports in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, that they work behind bulletproof glass in a well-guarded building.

 As the protests reached a fever pitch—and politicians urged an outright ban on Scientology—German authorities put some distance between them and the protesters. “We haven’t been able to prove that Scientologists ask its members to commit crimes,” a prosecutor told the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. “About all I can say about Scientology is that I’m glad my kids aren’t members, but as far as criminal law goes, we don’t have anything against them.”

The protests were not the only problem Tom had with Germany. The German magazine
Bunte
published a story that alleged that Tom could not have children because his sperm count was too low. Tom countered with a $60 million defamation lawsuit. Within two weeks, the magazine issued a statement apologizing for the allegations: “
Bunte
has been informed that Tom Cruise is not infertile and that his sperm count is completely normal.
Bunte
apologizes to Tom Cruise and his family for this embarrassing and irritating incident.” The publisher blamed the mistake on a writer that it promised would never work for the magazine again. Satisfied, Tom dropped the lawsuit.

In December 1996, after what seemed an eternity to Nicole,
Portrait of a Lady
was released. The reviews were harsh. Under a headline that read, "An Unflattering Portrait,"
Washington Post
writer Desson Howe wrote that his opinion of the movie had remained unchanged after two viewings—the acting was solid, but the overall film was lacking in energy: “
Portrait
feels like an elegant party, full of attractive people, beautiful finery and tremendous music, yet no excitement. And no matter how many times you revisit the place, it never gets better.”

 Writing in the
Los Angeles Times
, Kenneth Turan, offered his opinion that “Though
Portrait’s
satisfactions don’t have much to do with surprise, the argument could be made that the performances of the two leads could use some fine-tuning. Kidman is the picture of clarity, purpose and single-minded intelligence as Isabel, but also colder than she perhaps needs to be.”

Barbara Shulgasser, movie critic for the
San Francisco Examiner
, described the film as a romantic horror story. “We never have even a suggestion of what so many men find irresistible about Isabel,” she wrote. “Here, Kidman’s uncanny resemblance to Elizabeth Montgomery in “Bewitched” makes taking her seriously a real chore.”

 Nicole hardly deserved the criticism she received. If she had offered a more glamorous Isabel, she would have been castigated for fluffing up the role. And what does “Bewitched” have to do with all the hard work she put into the role?

Of course, Nicole did have her admirers. David Sterritt, writing in the
Christian Science Monitor,
declared her performance first-rate: “Nicole Kidman, quickly becoming one of her generation’s most versatile actresses, gives Isabel a blend of high intentions and unshakable naiveté that James might well have applauded.”

 The same month that
Portrait of a Lady
was released, bringing in only $134,805 on opening weekend,
Jerry Maguire
was released with an opening weekend take of  $17 million. Turan, the same critic who was less than enthusiastic about
Portrait of a Lady
, was much more generous to Tom’s movie. Wrote Turan: “As loved by the camera as any actor of his generation, Cruise starts with the familiar but expands to show his character in extremis, with the self-confident grin pushed to the cracking point.”

Nicole took the slam-dunk competition with good grace, but she would surely have been forgiven if she wondered why she sometimes bothered to get out of bed.

~ ~ ~
  

Nicole’s next film,
The Leading Man
, is hardly ever mentioned in her press biographies, primarily because she played only a small role, but also because it is an “arty” film that deals, among other things, with interracial romance.

 Nicole agreed to appear in the film because she had worked in the early 1990s with Australian director John Duigan on
Flirting
—and she was loath to say no to any Australian filmmaker, for who knew when the American bubble could burst?—and because she had worked on the same film with black actress Thandie Newton, for whom she had a lot of respect.

The Leading Man
takes place in modern-day London and is about a successful English playwright, Felix Webb (played by Lambert Newton) who has a new play,
The Hit Man
, in rehearsal. Everything is going well in his life, except for his personal life. He is in love with Hilary Rule (played by Thandie Newton), the star of his play, a complication since he is married to Elena (played by Anna Galiena), whom he loves as well. His solution is to ask his leading man, Robin Grange (played by ex-rocker Jon Bon Jovi) to seduce his wife as a means of taking pressure off of him. Elena knows about Felix’s affair with Hilary and has been tormenting him with passive-aggressive acts such as butchering his hair while he is asleep and cutting his neckties in half when he is away.