Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (27 page)

Nicole seemed very nervous and ill at ease, as if she might explode into a full-blown panic attack, the realization of which probably promoted the interviewer to address the remainder of his questions to a radiant Zellweger. It was a scenario that made Nicole’s supporters cringe because she seemed jittery and in a near panic as she watched Zellweger finish the interview.     

Inside the theater, Nicole settled down amid the elegant cherry-wood moldings and the walls lined with ornate opera boxes. She felt safe in the auditorium, where reporters could not rush her seat and ask her unwanted questions. Within seconds of sitting down, she was again glowing with regal self-confidence.

Though she never let her smile drop, it turned out to be a disappointing night for both her and Luhrmann. In the best picture category,
Moulin Rouge
lost to director Ron Howard's
A Beautiful Mind
(Howard also won for best director) and Nicole lost to Halle Berry for her role in
Monster’s Ball.

Nicole kept smiling when presenter Russell Crowe gave the award to Berry, but she must have felt humiliated when Berry turned what was supposed to be a brief moment of glory into an emotional, second-dragging tribute to “every nameless, faceless woman of color who now has a chance (to win an Oscar).”

For
Moulin Rouge
to win no Oscars in the major categories (Luhrmann’s wife, Catherine Martin, won two Oscars for costume design and art direction) was a shock to Nicole, because in the weeks leading up to the event, writers had proclaimed her the sentimental favorite.

Reuters news service had gushed one week before the ceremony, “If life was a Hollywood movie, Nicole Kidman would crown a year of personal woes and professional triumph by walking off into the sunset with her first Oscar. And the audience would stand up and cheer because when it comes to sympathy votes, Kidman’s already a winner.”

The loss was a blow to Kidman, who had thought that if she ever won an Oscar it would be for
Moulin Rouge
. The news media was obviously rooting for her, as was the public, but neither had a vote in the proceedings. The Oscars are more about money than they are about popularity, unless, of course, the popularity is accompanied with money.

Nicole could be forgiven if she thought that her poor showing at the Oscars was a product of her divorce from Tom. He was the all-American poster boy for establishment Hollywood, while she had a reputation for preferring the less glossy films produced and directed by Europeans and Australians. He made $20 million per film and she made $2 million per film. He was one of
them
, so when academy members cast their votes for Oscars, why would they express their support of his ex-wife?

~ ~ ~

Whether it was a sign of her growing emotional maturity, or another symptom of her increasingly obsessive work habits, Nicole did not spend much time grieving over her loss of an Oscar. Instead, she jumped into another movie project.

The Human Stain
, which was directed by Robert Benton (with whom Nicole worked on
Billy Bathgate
) is about a classics professor named Coleman Silk (played by Anthony Hopkins) who has a secret affair with a much younger woman named Faunia Farley (played by Nicole). Based on the 2000 novel of the same title by author Philip Roth, the story centers on a colleague’s reconstruction of Silk’s illustrious career as an educator.

For the first time since
Eyes Wide Shut,
Nicole consented to engage in raunchy, on-screen sex with Hopkins, who, at sixty-four, was nearly twice her age. The actor said that despite his age, he had no problems doing the sex scenes with Nicole. “After all, what can they do?’ he told reporters, “—put me in jail!”

  Most of
The Human Stain
was filmed in Canada, primarily in Montreal, so Nicole did not have to travel extensively during production. She didn’t discuss the film much during production, but that was probably because she was doing nude scenes reported to be as steamy as those she did in
Eyes Wide Shut.
Why would she refuse to do nude scenes without a body suit in
The Hours
and then do nude scenes in
The Human Stain
? With Nicole, one never knows, but it might have been due to the fact her character in
The Hours
was a lesbian and the sex scenes presumably were with another woman. Hopkins may have been old and wrinkled, but he was a male and that seems to have made a difference with Nicole.

While Nicole worked on the film, Connor and Bella stayed with Tom, who was between projects. Interviewed during that time by a reporter from
Time
magazine, he stopped the conversation to take a telephone call from the children and then knelt close to the ground and whispered into the telephone so that the reporter could not hear.

Later, asked by the reporter what he thought about a comment that Nicole made on the
Late Show with David Letterman
—she had held up her foot and told the host that she could wear heels again, eliciting loud laughter from the audience at Tom’s expense—he said he wasn’t offended by the comment, adding, “She always wore heels. Truly I like her in heels. That’s never been a problem for me.”

Tom was surprised by the question, especially since Nicole’s comment had been made more than a year earlier; his divorce from Mimi had created a media buzz, but it had died down quickly. His divorce from Nicole, he now understood, was not going to simply vanish from the public eye.          

From Canada, Nicole flew to New York, where she spent a couple of days with Baz Luhrmann (gossips wondered if the meeting meant that there was going to be a
Moulin Rouge II
) and visited the set of
In the Cut
, which starred Meg Ryan. Nicole was not a tourist; she was the producer of the film. Nicole had purchased the rights to the novel written by Susanna Moore six years earlier and had persuaded her long-time friend Jane Campion to be the director.

Some people were surprised that Nicole asked Ryan to star in the film, considering their mutual connection to Russall Crowe (Ryan had dated him in 2001 and Nicole was linked to him after the breakup), but Nicole thought Ryan would be perfect for the part and Ryan, best known for her flare for chick-flicks, was flattered to be asked to star in an erotic thriller. Observers said the two women got along quite well.

  From New York, it was then on to Romania for Nicole, to begin work on yet another film—
Cold Mountain
, a Civil War-era film adapted from Charles Frazier’s best-selling novel of the same title, to be directed and written by Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of
The English Patient
. Nicole played the role of Ada, working opposite Jude Law, Renee Zellweger, Natalie Portman, and Donald Sutherland.

Nicole arrived in Romania in early August, about a week late for production, but her tardy arrival didn’t matter because the remote village where they were to begin filming was hit by heavy rains and flooding, devastating large sections of the countryside. With her were seven-year-old Connor and a small army of bodyguards and trainers. They stayed in a villa with ten other actors.

 
Cold Mountain
is the story of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman (played by Jude Law) and his attempt to return to the woman he loves, Ada. Tom Cruise was originally scheduled to play the part of Inman, but he withdrew from the project after separating from Nicole.

“I feel so privileged to be in it,” Nicole told the
Sydney Morning Herald
. “Anthony Minghella is a very spiritual, very kind man, and that infiltrates his work. He’s also very smart, and he’s written a beautiful script. And the people have been lovely, they’ve really embraced the film crew, which doesn’t always happen. And the locations are just glorious—although it is very hot.”

When not filming in and around the village—Minghella reportedly paid local farmers about three hundred dollars per cow for the inconvenience of relocating their livestock—Nicole flew to London or Budapest until called back to production. It was on one such trip to London that she encountered Adrian Deevoy,
GQ
magazine’s editor-at-large, who subsequently wrote a wildly enthusiastic article about falling in love with the actress, thus proving, once again, that the actress has a strange rapport with writers.

“As any man with a beating heart knows, when she dressed down she looks gorgeous and when she dresses up it’s just off the scale,” wrote Deevoy. “The first time we meet formally she is wearing an antique T-shirt, old Levis and perfectly weathered loafers. Out initial conversation is about perfume. She makes her own.

“‘Here,’ she smiles, offering a slender wrist for a detailed olfactory inspection. The smell is reminiscent of home-made custard and autumnal woodland, subliminally sweet and deceptively powerful. Although you’re never fully aware of it, her scent can subtly fill a room.”

Considering the mysterious, breath-taking effect Nicole has on writers—and the effect that muse peddlers seem to have on her—odds-makers would be well advised to chalk up a working scribe on her potential list of suitors-to-be, especially since, for the past five years, she has been secretly trying her hand at writing. Her first project as a writer? She worked on the Meg Ryan film,
In the Cut
, with director and long-time friend Jane Campion, though she didn’t ask for screen credit.

Nicole’s love life was the subject of intense speculation throughout 2001 and 2002. In May, 2001, while in Cannes, she was reported to be dating Italian movie producer Fabrizio Mosca, who debuted his first film,
The Hundred Steps
, at the film festival. Then, there was Adam Duritz, the lead singer of Counting Crows. Was she actually dating either of those men? Her publicist denied that was the case, saying that they were merely friends, but the truth hardly mattered at that point. America wanted her to be with
someone
—exactly who didn’t seem to matter.

~ ~ ~

“I’ve had a very strange life the past three years,” Nicole told
In Style
magazine. “I think I was very naïve. Over [that time period] I’ve had to encounter death [a reference to Stanley Kubrick’s passing]. I loved Stanley. It was very tough to lose him. And then divorce. All the things you think you’re never going to have to do. But, hey—other people are battling cancer, so in terms of the big picture, I go, ‘Pull yourself together, Nicole.’”

Nicole was able to pull herself together by focusing on her children, allowing her mother and sister to comfort her during the really hard times, taking her psychologist father’s advice—“when individuals are in the process of divorcing, they need to practice risk taking if they wish to establish new relationships; of course, you don’t have to look for a new partner if you choose not to”—and, of course, by throwing herself, without mercy, some would say, into her work.

Premiere
magazine put her career in perspective in May 2002, when it named Nicole to its “Power List 2002: The Lords of Hollywood,” along with other movers and shakers such as Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Cameron Crowe, and, yes, ex-husband Tom Cruise. Describing her as a “plucky divorcee,” who had thawed her icy image by the very human way in which she handled her divorce, the magazine gave her credit for singing her way to the Oscars in
Moulin Rouge
and for carrying
The Others
, but it also looked to the future by noting her willingness to get raped in
Dogville
(2002), her pluck to play a janitor opposite Anthony Hopkins in
The Human Stain (2003)
, and her willingness to wear a prosthetic nose as Virginia Wolf in
The Hours (2002)
.

The magazine also might have credited her unmitigated gall to play a Southerner in
Cold Mountain
(2003) and her fearlessness to leap into the role of the nose-twitching witch Samantha in the film version of the popular 1960s television show,
Bewitched
(2003).

Incredibly, as 2002 wore on, Nicole was able to re-establish a civil, sometimes surprisingly warm, relationship with Tom, with the common denominator being their children. It is not uncommon for parents to become closer to their children during and immediately after divorce—and Tom and Nicole were no exception.

Nicole took new delight is sharing stories about her children, especially if the stories were risqué. She told
Rolling Stone
about riding in a chauffeur-driven car in Vienna with Bella and several other people. Without warning, Bella suddenly broadcast that “My mommy has a vagina,” to which Nicole responded with a parental warning that it was not a subject she should be discussing. But before the warning sank in, Bella countered with, “It has fur on it. Some vaginas don’t have fur, and some do.”