Kim Jong Un

NAME Kim Jong Un, also written Kim Jong-un or Kim Jong Eun. In Korean usage, Kim is the family name. His principal offices are general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea and president of the State Affairs Commission. (1), (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Kim Jong Un is the supreme leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, commonly called North Korea. The third ruler of the Kim dynasty, he succeeded his father, Kim Jong Il, in December 2011 and is the grandson of the state’s founder, Kim Il Sung. His rule has combined severe political repression with accelerated nuclear and ballistic-missile development. (3)

BIRTH Kim was born on January 8, probably in 1984, although 1982 and 1983 have also been reported. The United States government has used 1984, while North Korean statements have favoured 1982. Even his birthplace has not been conclusively established.  (4)

FAMILY BACKGROUND His father, Kim Jong Il (1941–2011), ruled North Korea from 1994 until his death; his paternal grandfather, Kim Il Sung (1912–1994), founded the country. Below are portraits of Kim Jong Un's father and grandfather (Arirang Festival mass games in Pyongyang)

By Poniol

His mother, Ko Yong Hui, was an ethnic Korean born in Osaka, Japan, in 1952 to a Zainichi Korean family whose roots lay on Jeju Island. She was Japanese-born, rather than “half-Japanese” as sometimes claimed, and moved to North Korea as a child. (5)

Kim’s full brother is Kim Jong Chul and his sister is the influential official Kim Yo Jong; he also had an older half-brother, Kim Jong Nam. 

His great-grandfather Kim Hyong Jik was a teacher, Korean independence activist, Christian and part-time Protestant missionary. (6)

CHILDHOOD Kim grew up amid guarded villas, swimming pools, bowling alleys and exceptional privilege during years when many North Koreans suffered famine. North Korean propaganda later presented him as a child prodigy: a teachers’ manual claimed that he could drive and shoot at the age of three and win a yacht race at nine. These were state-sponsored legends, not verified biographical facts. (7), (8)

The route by which he became heir is more complicated than the familiar Disneyland story. Kim Jong Nam, once considered a possible successor, was detained at Tokyo’s Narita Airport in May 2001 while travelling on a false passport and said that he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland. The humiliation contributed to his fall from favour, after which Jong Un eventually emerged as Kim Jong Il’s chosen successor. (9)

EDUCATION Kim lived secretly in Switzerland. A boy identified as him attended the Liebefeld-Steinhölzli state school in Köniz, near Bern, as “Pak Un,” supposedly the son of a North Korean embassy employee, from 1998 until late 2000. Other evidence suggests that he had been in Switzerland earlier and may also have attended the International School of Berne. (10)

Former classmates remembered a quiet, private pupil who initially struggled with German but became more sociable. He was far more absorbed in basketball—especially Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls—than in academic work and was intensely competitive on court. After returning home, he reportedly studied at Kim Il Sung University and Kim Il Sung Military University, obtaining qualifications in physics and military studies. (11)

North Korean education devotes considerable time to ideological instruction and praise of the ruling family. The claim that exactly one-third of every pupil’s instruction concerns the Kims cannot be established as a universal figure, but elementary curricula include separate subjects about family members, and an 81-hour secondary-school course on Kim Jong Un was introduced in 2014. (12), (13)

CAREER RECORD 2009 Appointed to North Korea's National Defence Commission and secretly designated by his father, Kim Jong Il, as the official heir to the leadership—passing over his eldest half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, who had fallen out of favour after trying to sneak into Japan on a forged passport to visit Disneyland.

2010 Made a four-star general in the Korean People's Army and appointed Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party of Korea.

2011 Declared Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army following the death of Kim Jong Il on December 17, 2011.

2012 Formally assumed the top leadership titles, including First Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.

2016 Elected Chairman of the newly created State Affairs Commission, solidifying absolute governance over state institutions.

2018 Held historical summits with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Donald Trump in Singapore, becoming the first North Korean leader to meet a sitting U.S. President.

2021 Elevated his title to General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, further centralising control over party administration. 

APPEARANCE Kim is a short, heavy-set man with a broad face and closely shaved sides beneath a high, swept-back top. His hairstyle, gestures, horn-rimmed glasses and rounded silhouette have often been interpreted as deliberate echoes of Kim Il Sung, whose image possessed greater warmth and revolutionary legitimacy than that of Kim Jong Il. (14)

Kim in 2023 By Mil.ru, Wikipedia

FASHION His signature garment is a dark, high-collared Mao-style suit, often subtly pinstriped, worn with polished black shoes. It presents socialist continuity and visually links him to his grandfather, although Kim sometimes adopts Western business suits, overcoats or a black leather trench coat to project a younger, more modern image. (15)

CHARACTER School acquaintances described him as introverted, decisive, humorous and fiercely competitive, with a temper when he lost at basketball. As ruler he has appeared calculating, risk-tolerant and ruthless in removing possible rivals, while using smiles, embraces and informal “field guidance” to appear more approachable than his father. (11), (16)

SPEAKING VOICE Kim’s first televised public address, delivered at a military parade on April 15, 2012, lasted about twenty minutes. Contemporary reports described a youthful voice and a hesitant delivery; he kept his eyes largely on his prepared text. Regular public speeches marked a contrast with his taciturn father and associated him with his more demonstrative grandfather. (17), (18)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Former classmates recalled that Kim could be funny and “good for a laugh.” Dennis Rodman has described private occasions filled with laughter, karaoke, skiing and horse riding, although Rodman’s unusually friendly account cannot be treated as an impartial assessment of Kim’s character. (11), (19)

RELATIONSHIPS Kim is married to Ri Sol Ju, a former singer whose status as his wife was publicly confirmed in July 2012. 

Ri in 2018 By Blue House (Republic of Korea)

They are widely believed to have three children, although only a daughter—believed to be Kim Ju Ae—has appeared publicly. First shown beside an intercontinental missile in November 2022, she became increasingly prominent and by 2026 was assessed by South Korean intelligence as being positioned as a probable successor. (20)

His most unlikely foreign friendship is with retired American basketball player Dennis Rodman, who has visited North Korea repeatedly. Rodman revealed Ju Ae’s reported name after meeting the family in 2013. (19)

MONEY AND FAME No credible audit can separate Kim’s personal wealth from assets controlled by the North Korean state, so widely circulated multibillion-dollar “net worth” figures are speculative. Satellite research has nevertheless identified numerous luxurious family compounds with yachts, pools and equestrian facilities. A 2024 South Korean report estimated spending of up to $1.8 billion on vehicles, luxury goods, medical care and rewards for the elite. (21)

Kim’s face and activities dominate North Korean news, school materials and propaganda films. In 2011, as he was being prepared for succession, authorities reportedly instructed others bearing his name to change it “voluntarily”—a word carrying little practical choice in a dictatorship. (22)

FOOD AND DRINK Accounts from visitors and former household staff describe a taste for expensive cheese, wine, seafood, caviar and spirits, but many colourful claims about his diet are difficult to verify. His access to imported luxuries contrasts with persistent food insecurity among ordinary North Koreans. (23), (24)

A related family legend says that Kim Jong Il invented the hamburger. North Korean reporting actually credited the elder Kim with introducing a “double bread with meat,” or gogigyeopbbang, around 2000 and ordering its production for university students. It was a renamed hamburger rather than an original invention by Kim Jong Un. (25)

MUSIC AND ARTS Kim established the all-female Moranbong Band in 2012 as a modern showcase for state-approved pop and spectacle. Its debut unusually included Disney imagery and arrangements of Western music. Rodman has said that Kim enjoys 1980s American music, Frank Sinatra and karaoke. (19)

LITERATURE State publishing houses generate vast collections of ideological literature and political treatises credited to Kim Jong Un, which form mandatory reading material for North Korean citizens. 

A selection of Kim Jong Un's works. By jennybento from Jackson Heights

His first major address was titled Let Us March Forward Dynamically Towards Final Victory, Holding Higher the Banner of Songun, and a collection called Aphorisms appeared in 2016. (18)

There is little reliable evidence about Kim’s private reading. 

NATURE State photography repeatedly places Kim on a white horse at snowy Mount Paektu, the mountain central to the dynasty’s revolutionary mythology. The carefully staged images convey vigour, sacred lineage and national destiny rather than documenting a personal commitment to conservation. (26)

PETS He is frequently shown with horses, and in 2024 he presented Vladimir Putin with two Pungsan hunting dogs, a native Korean breed, during Putin’s visit to Pyongyang. (27)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Basketball has been Kim’s best-documented enthusiasm since adolescence. In Switzerland he wore Chicago Bulls kit and Air Jordan shoes, played almost daily and hated losing; as leader he hosted Rodman and a basketball exhibition in Pyongyang. 

He has also been associated with horse riding, skiing, yachting and jet-skiing. (11), (19)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kim reportedly earned a physics qualification, although the secrecy surrounding his education makes its academic value impossible to assess. His government has promoted science, technology, computing and distance learning, extended compulsory education from eleven to twelve years and emphasized technical training as a route to economic and military self-reliance. (1), (28)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Kim officially upholds Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism and Juche, the dynasty’s doctrine of political independence and self-reliance, reinforced by the Suryong principle of absolute leadership. 

North Korea is formally secular, but researchers compare its compulsory veneration of the Kim family to a state-sponsored theology; unauthorized religious belief and practice are severely punished. (29)

LEADER OF NORTH KOREA Kim Jong Un began to emerge as his father Kim Jong Il’s intended successor in the late 2000s, reportedly receiving posts within North Korea’s security and defence apparatus. It was not the sort of career progression that involved submitting a CV, attending an interview and waiting nervously for an email. In North Korea, the succession plan was rather more of a family matter.

In 2010, Kim was publicly promoted to four-star general and appointed vice-chairman of the Workers’ Party’s Central Military Commission, despite having no known military command experience. This was an impressive achievement for a young man whose military career had barely begun, rather like being made admiral after successfully finding the swimming pool.

After Kim Jong Il died on December 17, 2011, Kim Jong Un was proclaimed the “great successor” and assumed supreme command of the Korean People’s Army. A January 2011 directive reportedly ordered North Koreans who were already named Kim Jong Un to change their names and prohibited parents from giving the name to newborn children. It is difficult to imagine many governments having quite such a low tolerance for nominative competition.

In 2012, Kim became first secretary of the Workers’ Party, chairman of its Central Military Commission and first chairman of the National Defence Commission. In July he was awarded the rank of marshal, completing an extraordinarily rapid ascent through the military hierarchy. Most people have to spend years working their way up an organisation; Kim had the advantage of being the organisation’s next owner. 

Between 2013 and 2017, Kim consolidated his power through purges while North Korea conducted four nuclear tests and accelerated its missile programme. In November 2017, the country tested the Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile, after which Kim declared North Korea’s nuclear force complete. This was an unusually confident use of the word “complete,” given that the missiles and nuclear weapons had presumably not received the memo.

In 2016, Kim was elected chairman of the Workers’ Party and became chairman of the newly created State Affairs Commission, further concentrating political and military authority in his hands. North Korea had never been especially enthusiastic about spreading power around, but Kim was clearly determined to make certain nobody misunderstood the point.

In 2018 and 2019, Kim embarked on an extraordinary period of diplomacy. He held three summits with South Korean president Moon Jae-in and three unprecedented meetings with US president Donald Trump, in Singapore, Hanoi and at the Korean Demilitarized Zone. The meetings temporarily reduced tensions and produced an impressive collection of handshakes and photographs, but no lasting agreement on denuclearisation. Diplomacy had, at least briefly, replaced missile tests as the preferred form of international theatre. 

In 2021, Kim adopted the title general secretary of the Workers’ Party, the same title previously held by his father and grandfather. Political titles in North Korea have a pleasingly hereditary quality, rather like a family recipe, except that this one comes with considerably more artillery. 

From 2023 to 2025, Kim strengthened North Korea’s strategic and military ties with Russia. He met Vladimir Putin in Russia’s Far East in 2023, while Putin visited Pyongyang in 2024. In September 2025, Kim travelled to Beijing to attend China’s Victory Day parade, his first appearance at a multilateral gathering of foreign leaders. After years of relative isolation, he was now becoming a considerably more regular presence on the international stage.

In February 2026, the Ninth Congress of the Workers’ Party re-elected Kim as general secretary. The following month, the Supreme People’s Assembly reappointed him as president of the State Affairs Commission, confirming his position at the centre of North Korea’s political system. After all, when your grandfather founded the family business, your father ran it and you have inherited it, there is little reason to worry about an uncertain career path.

POLITICS Kim presides over a hereditary totalitarian system centred on the Workers’ Party, security agencies and armed forces. He initially combined limited market tolerance and high-profile construction with byungjin—the parallel pursuit of economic development and nuclear weapons—but after the failed Hanoi summit emphasized self-reliance, weapons expansion and closer alignment with Russia. In the 2020s he abandoned the older goal of peaceful Korean reunification and treated South Korea as a separate hostile state. (3), (30)

SCANDAL The gravest issue is state repression. A United Nations commission found that North Korean authorities had committed crimes against humanity including extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, sexual violence, enforced disappearance and deliberately prolonged starvation. It warned Kim that command responsibility could make him personally accountable. 

Kim’s uncle by marriage, Jang Song Thaek, was arrested and executed in December 2013 during a sweeping consolidation of power, officially for treason and factional activity. (31)

Kim’s estranged half-brother Kim Jong Nam was assassinated with VX nerve agent at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in February 2017; investigators linked the operation to North Korea, although Pyongyang denied responsibility. (9),

MILITARY RECORD Kim has no known battlefield service. His four-star generalship in 2010 was a political appointment designed to prepare the succession, but he later made military modernization his regime’s central achievement. Under him North Korea carried out four of its six nuclear tests and developed intercontinental, submarine-launched, hypersonic and solid-fuel missiles. (32)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kim is a heavy smoker and has long been obese; photographs have also shown periods of weight loss, a limp and apparent difficulty walking. In September 2026 South Korea’s intelligence service assessed him at more than 140 kilograms and at high cardiovascular risk, while reporting no immediate sign that he was unable to perform normal activities. North Korea’s secrecy makes recurrent stories of operations, comas or imminent death unreliable. (23)

A persistent lesion on Kim’s left cheek, first discernible in photographs from December 2020, appeared to increase in size over the following years and was estimated at approximately one centimetre by June 2024. Dermatologists examining photographs suggested several possible explanations, including a wart, cutaneous horn or keratoacanthoma, but no diagnosis has been confirmed. South Korean intelligence has separately reported that Kim suffers from dermatitis associated with allergies and stress. (33)

A growth on Kim's cheek, June 2024. By Kremlin.ru,

HOMES The ruling family uses numerous heavily secured residences. Satellite imagery has revealed coastal villas around Wonsan, private islands, marinas, yachts, pools, a riding track and shooting facilities. Former guest Dennis Rodman compared the Wonsan retreat to a private version of Hawaii or Ibiza. (34)

TRAVEL Kim has often used an armoured train for international diplomacy. His known foreign journeys as leader have taken him to China, Singapore, Vietnam, Russia and the southern side of the inter-Korean border; he has met Xi Jinping, Moon Jae-in, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. (35)

In September 2025 he travelled to Beijing with Kim Ju Ae for a major Chinese military parade, giving his daughter her international debut. (20)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Within North Korea, Kim appears constantly in Korean Central Television news, “field guidance” reports and documentaries that depict him as a soldier, builder and benevolent father. The 2022 propaganda film The Great Year of Victory, 2021 showed him riding a white horse, visiting construction projects and apparently limping while its narration praised his self-sacrifice. 

Outside North Korea he has become a frequent subject of news documentaries, memes and satire. Randall Park played a fictionalized Kim in the 2014 film The Interview, in which American television journalists are recruited to assassinate him. Pyongyang condemned the film, whose release became entangled with the cyberattack on Sony Pictures. 

ACHIEVEMENTS  From the regime’s perspective, Kim’s greatest achievements are the secure consolidation of dynastic power, North Korea’s emergence as a credible nuclear-armed state, major advances in long-range missiles and unprecedented summit diplomacy with a serving US president. He also oversaw showpiece housing and resort projects and education reforms stressing science and technology. 

These gains came at enormous cost. Diplomacy did not bring sanctions relief or denuclearization, economic improvement remained uneven, food insecurity persisted, and political freedom and human rights remained severely restricted. His record is therefore one of successful regime survival and military advancement rather than broad prosperity for North Koreans.

Sources: (1) Encyclopaedia Britannica (2) KBS World (3) Council on Foreign Relations (4) Wikipedia (5) BBC News (6) Wikipedia: Kim Hyong-jik (7) Brookings Institution (8) UPI (9) Reuters: Kim Jong Nam (10) Reuters: Switzerland (11) Politico (12) Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (13) BBC News: School Course (14) USA Today (15) Yonhap: Fashion (16) Radio Free Asia (17) ABC News Australia (18) Kim Jong Un’s First Public Speech (19) Reuters: Dennis Rodman (20) Reuters: Kim Ju Ae (21) The Wall Street Journal via To Vima (22) Reuters: Name Directive (23) The Straits Times (24) NK News (25) RedOrbit (26) KBS World: North Korean Documentaries (27) Reuters: Pungsan Dogs (28) Korea Institute for National Unification (29) US Department of State (30) The Diplomat (31) United Nations Commission of Inquiry (32) National Committee on North Korea (33) Asia Economy (34) Radio Free Asia: Residences (35) Yonhap News Agency

Nicole Kidman

NAME Nicole Mary Kidman. During her childhood she was nicknamed “Stalky” or “Stalk” because of her unusually tall, slender build. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Nicole Kidman is an Academy Award-winning Australian-American actress and producer famous for her exceptional versatility in both blockbusters and critically acclaimed arthouse cinema. She achieved widespread international recognition with films like Days of Thunder, To Die For, and Moulin Rouge!, and became the first Australian to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of writer Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002). In addition to her film career, she has won multiple Emmy Awards for her television work on series such as Big Little Lies. (2),

BIRTH Nicole Kidman was born on June 20, 1967, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her Australian parents were temporarily living in the United States while her father pursued academic research, and the family later spent time in Washington, D.C. Kidman possesses both American and Australian citizenship. (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Her father, Antony David Kidman, was a biochemist, clinical psychologist and author who became director of the Health Psychology Unit at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital. He died suddenly in Singapore on September 12, 2014, aged 75. Nicole’s mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, née Glenny, was a nursing instructor, edited her husband’s books and belonged to the Australian feminist organisation the Women’s Electoral Lobby. She died on September 7, 2024, aged 84. (4), (5)

Nicole is the elder of two daughters. Her younger sister, Antonia Kidman, became a television presenter and journalist. The sisters grew up in an intellectually curious household in which political, psychological and social questions were openly discussed. (6)

CHILDHOOD The Kidman family returned permanently to Australia when Nicole was about four and settled on Sydney’s North Shore. She was a shy, introverted child with very pale skin, freckles and naturally curly red hair. Because she burned easily in the Australian sun, she spent much of her free time indoors reading, inventing characters and acting out scenes from plays. 

Her height made her conspicuous. By the age of 13 or 14 she was already approximately 5 feet 9 inches tall and was teased for being a lanky, red-haired schoolgirl. Acting provided a refuge in which the self-conscious teenager felt more confident and in control. (7)

When Janelle Kidman developed breast cancer during Nicole’s adolescence, her daughter temporarily reduced her acting work. Kidman studied massage so that she could help with her mother’s physical therapy and reportedly earned money doing massage work. Janelle recovered after treatment. (1)

EDUCATION Kidman attended Lane Cove Public School and North Sydney Girls High School. She took ballet lessons from the age of three and later studied acting at Sydney’s Phillip Street Theatre, the Australian Theatre for Young People and, for a period, Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts. Naomi Watts, who became one of her closest friends, was among the young performers she met through acting school. 

Kidman did not follow a conventional university course. She began obtaining professional acting work as a teenager and concentrated on practical training in drama, mime, movement and voice. Her parents, who had originally hoped that she might study medicine or law, eventually supported her decision. (8)

CAREER RECORD 1983 Made her film debut in the Australian holiday film BMX Bandits and appeared in the remake of Bush Christmas.

1984 Temporarily halted her rising acting career to study massage therapy after her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, using her new skills to assist her mother's physical therapy and earn money for the family. 

1989 Gained international attention starring in the Australian psychological thriller Dead Calm.

1990 Made her Hollywood debut in Days of Thunder opposite Tom Cruise, establishing herself as a global star. 

2001 Earned her first Academy Award nomination for her performance as Satine in Baz Luhrmann's musical drama Moulin Rouge!. 

2002 Starred as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress, the BAFTA, and the Golden Globe Award. 

2004 Starred in Baz Luhrmann's £18 million Chanel No. 5 commercial, earning a spot in the Guinness World Records for the highest payment per minute to an actress in a commercial ($3.71 million).

2017 Executive-produced and starred in HBO's Big Little Lies, winning Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress and Outstanding Limited Series.

APPEARANCE Kidman is approximately 5 feet 11 inches tall, making her noticeably taller than many actresses. Her natural appearance includes pale, freckled skin, blue eyes and curly red hair, although she has frequently appeared blonde and has worn wigs or changed her hair colour for roles. As a teenager she regarded her height and complexion as disadvantages; they later became distinctive elements of her screen presence. (9)

Kidman in 2006 By Michael Albov 

FASHION Kidman became one of Hollywood’s most closely watched red-carpet figures, favouring sculptural gowns, strong colours and designs by major fashion houses. A pale-green embroidered Christian Dior dress worn to the 1997 Academy Awards helped establish her reputation as a fashion risk-taker. She has subsequently represented Chanel, Omega, Jimmy Choo and other luxury brands. (2)

In Moulin Rouge! she wore the “Satine” necklace, designed by Stefano Canturi. The 18-carat white-gold piece contained 1,308 diamonds totalling 134 carats and was valued at about $2.5 million. It was recognised as the most valuable item of jewellery created for a film. (10),

CHARACTER Kidman has described herself as fundamentally shy and introverted, despite choosing a profession requiring continual public exposure. 

Colleagues frequently emphasise her preparation, willingness to take emotional risks and readiness to work with challenging directors. She has said that acting allows her to explore impulses and personalities very different from her private self. 

She is also known for loyalty to longstanding friendships, particularly with Naomi Watts, and for maintaining close ties to her Australian family. Her production work has increasingly focused on creating complicated leading roles for women rather than waiting for such roles to be offered. (11)

SPEAKING VOICE Kidman retains an Australian accent in private life, although years in the United States have softened it. Her screen work has required numerous accents, including English for Virginia Woolf, American for Lucille Ball and Russian-inflected English in Nine Perfect Strangers. Her natural voice is soft and measured, but she can shift into an unusually low, breathy register for dramatic roles. (3)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Kidman’s humour is generally dry and self-deprecating. She has laughed publicly about her inability to cook moist chicken and her preference for the foam rather than the coffee in a cappuccino. A frequently reported party trick is her remarkably accurate impression of Tweety Pie from the Looney Tunes cartoons. (12)

RELATIONSHIPS Kidman met Tom Cruise while making Days of Thunder. They married in Telluride, Colorado, on December 24, 1990, and adopted two children, Isabella Jane and Connor Antony. Their separation was announced on February 5, 2001, and the divorce became final in August 2001, with irreconcilable differences cited in the proceedings. (13)

After the divorce Kidman had a private relationship with musician Lenny Kravitz. She later confirmed that they had been engaged, but said that neither was ready for marriage. They remained on friendly terms. (14)

Kidman met Australian country singer Keith Urban at a G’Day USA event in 2005. They married at Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel in Sydney on June 25, 2006. Their daughter Sunday Rose was born on July 7, 2008, and Faith Margaret was born through a gestational surrogate on December 28, 2010. Kidman and Urban separated in 2025, and their divorce was finalised in Nashville on January 6, 2026.  (13) 

Kidman and Urban in 2011 By David Torcivia 

MONEY AND FAMEKidman has ranked among the film industry’s highest-paid performers, but reliable figures for her total wealth vary considerably. Her 2004 Chanel No. 5 advertisement, directed by Baz Luhrmann, reportedly cost about £18 million. Guinness World Records recognised her as the highest-paid actress in an advertising commercial after she received approximately $3.7 million for the production. (1)

Fame has often made privacy difficult. While playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours, Kidman discovered that she could leave the set wearing Woolf’s prosthetic nose without being recognised by photographers following her during her divorce from Cruise. (1)

FOOD AND DRINK Kidman says that she eats most foods in moderation rather than following a rigid diet. Her favourite Australian meal is a seafood platter containing Sydney rock oysters, prawns, mud crab and lobster; she also enjoys the simple Australian “sausage sizzle.” Her preferred cappuccino contains plenty of foam and chocolate sprinkles.

Although generally health-conscious, she follows what she has called an 80-per-cent healthy approach rather than denying herself treats. (12) 

She has said that she is allergic to strawberries (15)

TV AND MOVIE CAREER Nicole Kidman made her feature-film debut as a teenager in 1983 with the Australian Christmas adventure Bush Christmas. 

She followed it that same year with BMX Bandits, a lively little film about three young bicycle enthusiasts getting themselves into considerably more trouble than their bicycles would suggest. Its international popularity made it the better remembered of her two early films and gave audiences their first glimpse of an actress who would eventually become considerably harder to keep on a BMX bike.

In 1987, Kidman attracted wider attention in Australia with the television miniseries Vietnam, playing a young woman whose experiences unfolded against the political and social divisions created by the Vietnam War. Two years later, Dead Calm brought her international notice. She starred opposite Sam Neill and Billy Zane in the maritime thriller, in which the ocean turns out to be considerably less calming than the title promises. She also appeared in the Australian television miniseries Bangkok Hilton.

Kidman's Hollywood breakthrough arrived in 1990 with Days of Thunder, a motor-racing drama in which she starred opposite Tom Cruise. The two married in 1990 and subsequently appeared together in Far and Away (1992) and Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

In 1995, Kidman played Dr Chase Meridian in Batman Forever, but it was her performance as the ruthlessly ambitious television presenter Suzanne Stone in To Die For that demonstrated how much darker her comic talents could be. Her performance won her first Golden Globe and established that she could play a character who was charming, calculating and faintly terrifying, sometimes all within the same sentence.

Her films in the late 1990s included Practical Magic, with Sandra Bullock, and Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's final film. The latter's long, highly confidential production kept the project in the news almost as much as the finished film did. Kidman emerged from the decade with a growing reputation for taking roles that were rather more interesting than simply being the attractive person standing next to the leading man.

In 2001, she displayed another talent as Satine, the glamorous courtesan at the centre of Baz Luhrmann's wildly theatrical Moulin Rouge!. She sang her way through the film and earned her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. That same year she starred in the supernatural thriller The Others, proving that she could move from singing and dancing in a gloriously excessive Parisian nightclub to wandering around a gloomy mansion without seeming to have changed careers.

Kidman's most celebrated dramatic performance came in 2002 with The Hours, in which she played writer Virginia Woolf. A prosthetic nose made her almost unrecognisable, although the performance itself was considerably more important than the disguise. She won the Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe for Best Actress. Around the same period she appeared in Dogville, Cold Mountain and The Human Stain, continuing a run of films that made it increasingly difficult to predict what sort of role she would choose next.

From 2004 to 2008, Kidman appeared in Birth, The Interpreter, Bewitched, Fur, The Golden Compass and Baz Luhrmann's Australian historical epic Australia. Somewhere along the way she also became the face of Chanel No. 5, which meant that even when she wasn't on a cinema screen, there was a reasonable chance she was appearing in a television advertisement looking extraordinarily elegant while surrounded by an amount of perfume-related mist normally associated with weather systems.

In 2010, Kidman starred in and produced Rabbit Hole, playing a mother struggling with the grief of losing her young son. The intensely emotional performance earned her another Academy Award nomination and showed that the spectacularly polished movie star could also carry a film through painful, restrained drama.

Her films from 2012 to 2016 included The Paperboy, The Railway Man, Before I Go to Sleep, Paddington and Lion. In Lion, she played an adoptive Australian mother, earning her fourth Academy Award nomination. It was another reminder that Kidman's career had long since escaped the conventional Hollywood path: she could move from serious dramas to a talking bear without appearing to regard the transition as particularly remarkable.

In 2017, Kidman made one of her most successful moves into television with HBO's Big Little Lies, which she also executive-produced. Her portrayal of Celeste Wright, a wealthy lawyer trapped in an abusive marriage, won her Emmy and Golden Globe awards. She also appeared that year in Top of the Lake: China Girl, The Beguiled and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a particularly productive period in which her characters ranged from deeply troubled to considerably more deeply troubled.

From 2018 to 2021, Kidman's work included Boy Erased, Destroyer, Aquaman and Bombshell. She returned to leading television roles in The Undoing and Nine Perfect Strangers, before portraying Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos. The performance earned her fifth Academy Award nomination.

Kidman's projects from 2022 to 2024 included The Northman, Special Ops: Lioness, Expats, A Family Affair, The Perfect Couple and Babygirl. For Babygirl, she received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. She was unable to collect the prize in person, however, having left the festival following the death of her mother.

In 2026, Kidman took on one of her more formidable television assignments, playing forensic pathologist Dr Kay Scarpetta in Amazon's adaptation of Patricia Cornwell's crime novels. She also returned to one of her earlier roles, playing Gillian Owens opposite Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic 2, released 28 years after the original. Hollywood had spent decades making sequels to everything imaginable, but even so, nearly three decades is a fairly impressive interval between visits to the same enchanted kitchen.

MUSIC AND ARTS Kidman sings in Moulin Rouge! and recorded the duet “Somethin' Stupid” with Robbie Williams, which reached #1 in the United Kingdom. She can play the piano and has maintained a strong interest in theatre, dance and visual art. Her marriage to Keith Urban also brought her into close contact with the country-music world. (3), (9)

LITERATURE As a pale-skinned child often kept indoors, Kidman became an enthusiastic reader and acted out Chekhov plays in her bedroom. She recalled reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace at about 13 or 14. She later narrated an unabridged audiobook of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. (8)

Kidman has also been reported as an admirer of Philip Larkin, including his bleakly humorous poetry about family life. (1), (21)

NATURE Kidman values rural quiet and has described the simplicity, clean air and peace of her New South Wales farm as its principal attractions. Its grounds have included cattle, goats, lavender fields, an orchard and chickens, and she has made jam from its fruit. (16)

PETS Kidman is an enthusiastic animal lover. At various times her household has included Siberian cats, fish, chickens, a poodle named Julian and six alpacas kept in Australia. Her first childhood dog was a schnauzer named Ozzie, although she joked that the dog appeared to dislike the family. (9), (6)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Swimming is one of Kidman’s favourite forms of exercise. She also enjoys running, yoga, spinning and walking, and inherited an enthusiasm for running from her marathon-running father. When in Sydney she likes running near the beach; in Tennessee she has preferred wooded routes. (12)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kidman grew up around science and psychology through her father’s work as a biochemist and clinical psychologist. Her role as forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta required her to become familiar with the language and procedures of pathology and criminal investigation. (5)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Kidman was raised as a Roman Catholic and has described herself as religious. She has said that the Ten Commandments strongly influenced her childhood values and that she continued to attend church with her family. Her 2006 marriage to Keith Urban took place in a Catholic chapel. (8) 

POLITICS Kidman’s feminism was strongly influenced by her mother, who took Nicole and Antonia to meetings of the Women’s Electoral Lobby. Kidman became a goodwill ambassador for UNIFEM, later UN Women, campaigning particularly against violence towards women. (6), (17)

In 2017 her suggestion that Americans should support their newly elected president, Donald Trump, was interpreted by some as a political endorsement. Kidman clarified that she had merely been expressing support for democracy and the United States Constitution, not endorsing Trump or his policies. (5)

SCANDAL Kidman’s marriage to Tom Cruise generated persistent speculation connected with Cruise’s sexuality and Scientology. Claims that the marriage was merely a cover have never been substantiated. Cruise successfully pursued legal action against pornographic performer Chad Slater after Slater made a false claim about a sexual relationship with him. 

Kidman has generally declined to discuss Scientology or the religious choices of her two older children. She has said that they are adults entitled to make their own decisions and that her responsibility as their mother is to love them unconditionally. (18)

MILITARY RECORD Her professional connection with warfare has been through acting, notably the Vietnam War miniseries Vietnam and the Second World War drama The Others. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kidman protects her exceptionally fair skin with high-factor sunscreen. She exercises through swimming, running, yoga and spinning but does not follow an inflexible fitness regime. In 2020 she broke her ankle after stepping into a pothole while running near her Nashville home. (9), (12)

She has an intense fear of butterflies and moths dating from childhood. She once attempted to overcome it by entering the butterfly enclosure at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, but said the experience did not cure her fear. (15)

HOMES Kidman has divided much of her adult life between Australia and the United States. Her residences have included homes in Sydney, Sutton Forest in New South Wales, Nashville, Los Angeles and New York. Her 111-acre Australian country property has functioned as a working farm as well as a family retreat. (16), (11)

TRAVEL Kidman’s birthplace, dual citizenship and international career have given her a life divided between continents. She has travelled extensively for filming, festivals and humanitarian work. 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA  In addition to her acting roles, Kidman has appeared in advertising campaigns for Chanel No. 5, Omega, Jimmy Choo and Etihad Airways. Her stylised Chanel film with Baz Luhrmann reunited her with the director of Moulin Rouge! and became one of the most expensive advertisements ever produced. 

Kidman has graced the covers of hundreds of major international magazines, including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Time.

In 2021 she became the face of AMC Theatres’ “We Make Movies Better” campaign. The solemn advertisement, in which she celebrates the communal experience of cinema, became an internet phenomenon and was widely imitated, quoted and parodied.

ACHIEVEMENTS She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2003 (The Hours), becoming the first Australian actress to receive the honor. 

Her accolades also include two Primetime Emmy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

In 2006, she was made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for her service to the performing arts and humanitarian causes

In 2024 the American Film Institute presented her with its Life Achievement Award, making her the first Australian actor to receive the honour

Sources (1) Encyclopedia of Trivia (2) National Portrait Gallery of Australia (3) Encyclopaedia Britannica (4) ABC News (5) ABC News Australia (6) Tatler (7) BBC Radio 4 (8) DuJour (9) The Guardian (10) Canturi (11) Time (12) Delish (13) People (14) Los Angeles Times (15) Hello! (16) BBC Countryfile (17) UN Women (18) BBC News

Nikita Khrushchev

 NAME Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, commonly rendered as Nikita Khrushchev in English. His surname is also sometimes transliterated as Khrushchov. (1)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Khrushchev was the dominant leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s until 1964. He is best remembered for denouncing Joseph Stalin, beginning de-Stalinization, promoting “peaceful coexistence” with the West and confronting the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (2)

BIRTH He was born on April 15, 1894, in Kalinovka, a village in the Kursk Governorate of the Russian Empire, near the present Russian border with Ukraine. During his lifetime he celebrated his birthday on April 17, but the local church register revealed that April 15 was the correct date. (3)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Khrushchev came from an impoverished Russian peasant family. His father, Sergei Nikanorovich Khrushchev, worked intermittently as a farm labourer, railwayman and coal miner, while his mother, Ksenia Ivanovna, undertook domestic and agricultural work; Nikita also had a younger sister named Irina. (4)

CHILDHOOD The family lived in a mud-walled peasant cottage, and Nikita spent part of his childhood tending livestock and working in the fields. 

In 1908 they moved to the industrial settlement of Yuzovka, now Donetsk in Ukraine, where the 14-year-old Khrushchev became an apprentice metal fitter and later worked in the mines. (5)

EDUCATION Khrushchev received only a few years of elementary schooling but was reportedly an able pupil with a particularly good memory. 

After the Russian Civil War he attended a workers’ school in the Donbas, and in 1929 he entered Moscow’s Stalin Industrial Academy, although party work prevented him from completing a conventional engineering qualification. (6)

CAREER RECORD 1908 Worked as a metal fitter, mechanic, and miner in the Donbas region of Ukraine.

1918 Joined the Bolshevik Party and fought as a Red Army commissar during the Russian Civil War.

1929 Moved to Moscow to study at the Industrial Academy, where he began climbing the Communist Party hierarchy under Stalin's patronage.  

1935 Appointed First Secretary of the Moscow Communist Party, overseeing the construction of the Moscow Metro. 

1938 Appointed First Secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine, becoming a full member of the Politburo in 1939. 

1941-1945 Served as a high-ranking military political officer during World War II, participating in the defense of Stalingrad. 

1953 Outmaneuvered political rivals following the death of Joseph Stalin to become First Secretary of the Communist Party.  

1958 Appointed Premier of the Soviet Union, consolidating his absolute authority over both the party and state. 

1964 Ousted from power in a bloodless palace coup orchestrated by Leonid Brezhnev and forced into retirement.

APPEARANCE Khrushchev was short, bald, round-faced and heavily built, with prominent ears and an expressive smile. His squat, unmistakable appearance contrasted sharply with the austere public image cultivated by Stalin and made him an immediately recognizable figure in newsreels and political cartoons.  

He had small, deep-set eyes, a conspicuous gap between his upper front teeth, and several facial moles or warts, including a prominent one on his cheek. (7)

Official portrait, 1954

FASHION He generally wore plain, loosely fitting dark suits, white shirts and conservative ties, while his military appearances featured a lieutenant general’s uniform covered with decorations. His clothing was practical rather than elegant and reinforced his deliberately unpretentious, working-class image. (2)

CHARACTER Khrushchev was energetic, impulsive, emotional and intensely ambitious. He could be warm, sociable and surprisingly accessible, but he was also impatient, domineering and capable of furious outbursts; his combination of genuine reforming instincts and reckless improvisation made his leadership notably inconsistent. (6)

SPEAKING VOICE He spoke emphatically in a rough, strongly projected voice and retained traces of southern Russian and Ukrainian speech. Khrushchev preferred improvisation to polished scripts, peppering his remarks with peasant sayings, jokes and colourful expressions; diplomats observed that he spoke with conviction but sometimes chose his words carelessly. (8)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Khrushchev enjoyed teasing companions and puncturing solemnity with earthy jokes. When asked about fishing, he reportedly described the fish looking at the hook and wondering what fool was sitting at the other end of the line—a joke reflecting his impatience with inactive pastimes. (6)

RELATIONSHIPS His first wife, Yefrosinia Pisareva, died of typhus during the Russian Civil War, leaving him with two children, Yulia and Leonid. A brief second relationship or marriage followed before he formed a lasting partnership in the 1920s with Ukrainian Communist activist Nina Kukharchuk; they did not formally register their marriage until 1965. (5)

Khrushchev and Nina had four children, although their first died in infancy; the surviving children were Rada, Sergei and Yelena. Leonid, Khrushchev’s son by his first wife, disappeared while serving as a Soviet fighter pilot in 1943 and was presumed killed. (5)

Khrushchev's with his second wife Nina Petrovna Kukharchuk in 1924

MONEY AND FAME High office gave Khrushchev access to government residences, servants, official cars and guarded holiday homes, but there is no persuasive evidence that he accumulated a personal business fortune. After his removal, he retained an apartment, a country dacha and a state pension, eventually reported as about 400 roubles a month. (9)

FOOD AND DRINK Khrushchev favoured substantial Russian and Ukrainian cooking, particularly meat, borscht, dumplings, pies and millet-and-pork kulesh. 

Despite his political enthusiasm for planting maize, it was principally intended as animal feed rather than his favourite food; his personal chef recalled that he particularly enjoyed tenderloin and meat cooked with mushrooms or prunes. (10)

His preferred drink was plain vodka, which he enjoyed at both official banquets and private gatherings, and cognac became a fixture of his entertaining once he rose to the leadership, regularly appearing at receptions and toasts with foreign visitors. Biographer Roy Medvedev noted that, unlike Stalin, Khrushchev "knew how to drink but never got dead drunk" and did not force guests into the punishing marathon toasts Stalin had inflicted on the Politburo.  (11)

In his later years doctors advised him to curb his health regimen because of kidney, bladder and prostate trouble, and while he was told to give up smoking, he continued drinking cognac and vodka in moderate quantities rather than abandoning them altogether — so his restraint was more a matter of long-standing temperament than a strict late-life discipline.

MUSIC AND ARTS Khrushchev preferred melodic, accessible music and enjoyed Russian and Ukrainian folk songs, violinist David Oistrakh and the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theatre. 

He attended opera and theatre regularly but had little enthusiasm for ballet or abstract art; in December 1962 he notoriously abused avant-garde artists at an exhibition in Moscow’s Manege. (12), (13)

LITERATURE He maintained a rigid socialist realist standard during his regime, though he personally supported the 1962 publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, believing that Stalinist abuses should be exposed. After retirement he read Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and admitted, “We shouldn’t have banned it. I should have read it myself.” (14)

From 1967 he dictated extensive memoirs into a tape recorder at his dacha. Copies of the recordings were secretly taken abroad, providing the basis for Khrushchev Remembers, published in the West in 1970 despite Soviet attempts to discredit it. (15)

NATURE He enjoyed country life, planting fruit trees and tending vegetables, tomatoes, peas and maize on the grounds of his dachas. His son Sergei remembered him as an enthusiastic gardener who also liked searching the woods for wild mushrooms. (13)

Image by Chat GBT

PETS Khrushchev received several dogs as diplomatic gifts, reportedly including Chihuahuas from Fidel Castro and a white poodle from Queen Elizabeth II. In retirement he kept a much-loved shepherd named Arbat and later a mongrel called Belka, arguing that mongrels were cleverer and less demanding than pedigree dogs. (16)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS His favourite outdoor recreation included walking, gardening, mushroom picking and hunting ducks, hares, deer and wild boar. 

He enjoyed entertaining guests and prolonged conversation, but fishing held less appeal; in retirement, however, he sometimes went fishing with his grandchildren. (6), (10)

In retirement, he took up amateur photography and gardening.

SCIENCE AND MATHS His early technical training gave him an enduring interest in machinery, industrial production and agricultural technology, though he was not a scientist or mathematician. 

As Soviet leader he strongly backed rockets and space exploration, presiding over the launches of Sputnik 1 in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin’s first human space flight in 1961. (4)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Although raised in an Orthodox Christian environment, Khrushchev became a committed Marxist-Leninist and atheist. His belief that scientific socialism would eventually supersede capitalism lay behind the notorious phrase “We will bury you,” which meant that communism would outlast capitalism rather than that the Soviet Union intended literally to bury Western populations. 

His government nevertheless conducted an aggressive anti-religious campaign, closing thousands of churches, monasteries and seminaries and restricting religious education. These measures formed a conspicuous exception to the broader cultural relaxation associated with the Khrushchev Thaw. (17)

LEADER OF THE SOVIET UNION Nikita Khrushchev inherited a Soviet Union that was still living in the enormous shadow of Joseph Stalin, a man who had spent decades making the Communist Party less a political organisation than a very large machine for frightening people. Khrushchev began dismantling that legacy in one of the most extraordinary speeches of the 20th century.

In February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Khrushchev delivered what became known as the "Secret Speech," a four-hour denunciation of Stalin's crimes. He described the purges, executions, forced confessions and arbitrary repression carried out under Stalin, and attacked the former dictator's increasingly extravagant personality cult. It was an astonishing admission from a Soviet leader: the system had not merely made mistakes; it had spent years terrorising its own citizens. The speech was intended for a restricted audience, but its contents soon leaked and spread around the world, producing shock throughout the Communist bloc. 

The result was a period of relative relaxation known as the Khrushchev Thaw. Censorship was eased, political prisoners were released in large numbers, and writers, artists and intellectuals found somewhat more room to breathe. Soviet life did not suddenly become a model of free expression — this was still the Soviet Union, after all — but compared with the Stalin years, the atmosphere was positively springlike.

Khrushchev was equally determined to transform Soviet agriculture, although his enthusiasm sometimes ran considerably faster than the soil. His most ambitious agricultural project was the Virgin Lands Campaign, launched in 1954, which brought millions of acres of previously uncultivated land in Kazakhstan, Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union under the plough. The initial harvests were spectacular, encouraging Khrushchev to believe that the Soviet Union had discovered the agricultural equivalent of a magic trick. Unfortunately, the long-term results were much less impressive. Soil erosion, drought and other problems eventually exposed the limitations of simply ploughing enormous quantities of land and hoping for the best.

Khrushchev's leadership was characterised by this mixture of genuine reform, enormous ambition and a tendency to charge ahead before anyone had quite worked out where the road was going. He could be energetic and surprisingly pragmatic one moment and impulsive the next. His enthusiasm for agricultural experiments extended even to maize, which he promoted with almost missionary zeal after becoming impressed by American farming methods. Soviet officials sometimes found themselves cultivating corn in places where the climate appeared to regard the idea as a personal insult.

His foreign policy was similarly unpredictable. Khrushchev sought peaceful competition with the West but was perfectly capable of producing international crises, most famously during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba brought the world frighteningly close to nuclear war. The crisis ended with a compromise, but it reinforced the impression that Khrushchev was a leader capable of taking enormous risks and then having to work rather hard to get everyone safely back from the edge.

His tenure therefore produced an unusual mixture of liberalisation and confrontation, reform and improvisation. Khrushchev attacked Stalin's dictatorship, encouraged a cultural thaw and attempted to modernise Soviet agriculture, yet he remained an authoritarian Communist leader with little patience for opposition. His career demonstrated that removing one dictator's portrait from the wall does not necessarily mean changing the entire building.

In October 1964, Khrushchev was removed from power by his colleagues, who had evidently decided that his particular combination of energy, unpredictability and agricultural enthusiasm was becoming rather exhausting. He spent his remaining years in retirement, writing his memoirs and living quietly outside public life. For all his faults, Khrushchev had helped expose some of Stalin's worst crimes and had loosened the grip of terror that had dominated the Soviet Union for decades. His reforms did not transform the system, but they changed what could be said about it — and sometimes, in politics, getting people to admit that the emperor has no clothes is the first difficult step.

POLITICS Khrushchev attempted to reform Soviet communism without abandoning the Communist Party’s monopoly of power. He reduced the authority of the security police, freed and rehabilitated many victims of Stalinism, and expanded housing and consumer production.

He championed "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist West while simultaneously competing aggressively for global influence across Third World nations. Khrushchev maintained strict control over Eastern Bloc satellite states, including forcibly suppressed the Hungarian uprising of 1956 and supporting the construction of the Berlin Wall. (2)  (4)

SCANDAL Khrushchev’s later denunciation of Stalin did not erase his own complicity in the purges. As a senior party official in Moscow and Ukraine, he zealously implemented Stalinist policies, approved repression and presided over campaigns in which numerous officials and ordinary citizens were arrested, imprisoned or executed. (18)

He is widely remembered for supposedly removing a shoe and banging it on his desk at the United Nations in 1960. Eyewitness accounts conflict, no film conclusively records the act and the famous photograph showing the shoe was altered, so the precise details remain disputed. (19)

MILITARY RECORD During the Russian Civil War Khrushchev served as a Bolshevik political officer rather than as a front-line commander. 

In World War II he sat on the military councils of several fronts, including the Stalingrad Front, advised senior commanders and finished the war with the rank of lieutenant general. (20)

Nikita Khrushchev posing in a Red Army uniform following the Soviets' entry into the conflict.

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Khrushchev’s weight increased substantially during his political career, although he remained active and maintained a punishing working schedule. 

His removal was publicly attributed to age and ill health, but it was a political ousting; during retirement he experienced depression, periods of illness and several heart attacks. (21)

HOMES Khrushchev was born in a poor cottage in Kalinovka and spent his youth among the mines and workers’ settlements of the Donbas. As leader he occupied state apartments and guarded dachas; following his dismissal, he lived mainly at a more modest government dacha at Petrovo-Dalneye, west of Moscow, while retaining a Moscow apartment. (15), (9)

TRAVEL Khrushchev travelled extensively as Soviet leader, visiting Britain, Yugoslavia, France, India, Indonesia and numerous other countries. His 1959 American tour was the first visit to the United States by a serving Soviet leader and took him from Washington and New York to Hollywood and an Iowa farm. 

During the American visit he made two much-publicized requests: to visit Disneyland and to meet John Wayne. Security officials prevented the Disneyland excursion, but Khrushchev met Wayne at a Hollywood reception and enthusiastically discussed the relative merits of vodka and tequila with him. (7)

DEATH  Khrushchev suffered his third major heart attack at his country home and died in Moscow’s Central Clinical Hospital on September 11, 1971, aged 77. The Soviet government denied him a state funeral and burial at the Kremlin Wall, and he was interred instead at Novodevichy Cemetery. (23), (24)

His striking tomb was designed by Ernst Neizvestny, one of the modernist sculptors Khrushchev had publicly attacked. Its interlocking black granite and white marble symbolized the contradictory dark and progressive sides of Khrushchev’s life and rule. (22)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Khrushchev’s animated public appearances made him one of the first Soviet leaders to become an international television personality. His impromptu “Kitchen Debate” with U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon at the American National Exhibition in Moscow on July 24, 1959, was recorded on colour videotape and broadcast in both countries. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis played out before a worldwide television and radio audience and brought the Cold War closer to nuclear conflict than at any other time. Its immediate phase ended on October 28, 1962, when Khrushchev announced that the Soviet missiles in Cuba would be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union. 

Howard da Silva portrayed Khrushchev in the 1974 television film The Missiles of October, a dramatization of the crisis starring William Devane as John F. Kennedy and Martin Sheen as Robert Kennedy. 

ACHIEVEMENTS Khrushchev broke decisively with Stalin’s personality cult, released political prisoners and permitted a limited cultural and intellectual thaw. His period in power also encompassed mass housing construction, Sputnik, Gagarin’s flight and the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. 

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Encyclopaedia Britannica (3) U.S. National Park Service (4) BBC History (5) History (6) America Magazine (7) Los Angeles Times (8) GlobalSecurity.org (9) The Washington Post (10) Russia Beyond (11) Russian Life (12) Seventeen Moments in Soviet History (13) Chapman University: Interview with Sergei Khrushchev (14) Lapham’s Quarterly (15) Columbia University Libraries (16) Gateway to Russia (17) Seventeen Moments in Soviet History: Anti-Religious Campaign (18) Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (19) United Nations News (20) Generals.dk (21) UPI Archives (22) TIME

Johannes Kepler

NAME Johannes Kepler. He is occasionally rendered in older English texts as "Johann Kepler." 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician and astronomer best known for his three laws of planetary motion, which established that planets orbit the Sun in ellipses rather than perfect circles and that their speeds vary depending on their distance from the Sun. His analysis of Tycho Brahe's observational data led him to discover these laws, published first in Astronomia Nova (1609) and completed in Harmonice Mundi (1619). His work provided crucial evidence for the heliocentric model of Copernicus and later underpinned Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation. (1) 

BIRTH Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, at the Free Imperial City of Weil der Stadt, roughly 50 miles west of Stuttgart in what is now Germany. He arrived as a premature "seven-month" child, a fact he later documented with characteristic precision, noting the pregnancy had lasted exactly 224 days, 9 hours, and 53 minutes. (2)

Kepler's birthplace, in Weil der Stadt, Germany By MarkusHagenlocher

FAMILY BACKGROUND Kepler's father, Heinrich Kepler, earned a precarious living as a mercenary soldier and abandoned the family when Johannes was five years old; Kepler himself later described him as "vicious, inflexible, quarrelsome, and doomed to a bad end." 

His mother, Katharina Guldenmann, was the daughter of an innkeeper and worked as a healer and herbalist, though Kepler described her too in unflattering terms as "small, thin, swarthy, gossiping and quarrelsome." 

His paternal grandfather, Sebald Kepler, had served as mayor of Weil der Stadt, while his maternal grandfather was an innkeeper and mayor of the nearby village of Eltingen. (2) (3)

CHILDHOOD Kepler was introduced to astronomy at an early age and, at age six, observed the Great Comet of 1577; two years later his mother took him to a hilltop to witness a lunar eclipse. 

Around the same period he survived a severe bout of smallpox that left his hands partially crippled and his eyesight permanently impaired with multiple vision, afflictions that made him unsuited for physical labor but pushed him toward intellectual pursuits. 

He spent time being raised largely by his grandparents while his parents were often absent, and guests at his grandfather's inn were reportedly astonished by the boy's ability to solve numerical problems. (4)

EDUCATION Kepler attended the Tübinger Stift at the University of Tübingen, where he studied philosophy and theology while proving himself a superb mathematician. 

He earned a reputation as a skillful astrologer even as a student, casting horoscopes for his fellow students, and his mathematics professor Michael Maestlin introduced him to the Copernican heliocentric theory. He passed his Master's examination in 1591 and continued as a graduate student before being recommended, near the end of his studies, for a teaching post rather than the ministry he had originally intended to pursue. (5) 

CAREER RECORD 1594 Kepler accepted a position as teacher of mathematics and astronomy at the Protestant school in Graz, Austria, at the age of 23.

1600 Kepler first met the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe on February 4, at Benátky nad Jizerou near Prague, where Brahe's new observatory was being constructed; he stayed as a guest for two months analyzing Brahe's observations of Mars.

1601 Kepler was supported directly by Tycho Brahe, who assigned him to analyze planetary observations; after Brahe's unexpected death on October 24, Kepler was appointed his successor as Imperial Mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II.

1609 Kepler published his first two laws of planetary motion in Astronomia Nova (New Astronomy).

1611 Kepler published Dioptrice, a study of telescopic optics that helped legitimize Galileo's telescopic discoveries.

1619, Kepler outlined his third law of planetary motion, discovered on March 8, 1618, in Harmonice Mundi (Harmony of the Worlds).

1628, following the military successes of General Wallenstein's armies during the Thirty Years' War, Kepler was appointed an official adviser to Wallenstein, providing astronomical calculations and occasional horoscopes.

APPEARANCE Kepler was described as short, slight, and physically fragile. His bout with smallpox as a young child left him with permanently damaged eyesight—including severe myopia and multiple vision (polyopia)—as well as skin lesions and crippled, weak hands. Contemporaries described his appearance as modest, studious, and somewhat unkempt. (6)

Portrait by August Köhler 1910 after 1620 original

FASHION Kepler dressed in the sober, dark clothing typical of a Lutheran academic and court mathematician of his era, favoring plain scholarly attire over ostentation. There is little evidence he took any particular interest in fashion, his energies being devoted almost entirely to his studies. (6)

CHARACTER Kepler possessed an intensely curious, rigorous, and open-minded intellect combined with deep humility and spiritual piety. He was intensely self-analytical, frequently writing candid assessments of his own personal flaws and intellectual struggles. Known for his persistent work ethic, he spent years performing tedious hand calculations to prove planetary orbits.

Kepler was  described by contemporaries as amiable and affectionate in private, generous in recognizing the achievements of others, and largely free of envy despite the professional rivalries he faced. He was also solitary and prone to melancholy, with a strongly speculative, almost mystical bent of mind that coexisted with rigorous scientific precision — a combination that made his character, in the words of one early biographer, "especially difficult to estimate." (7)

SPEAKING VOICE The evidence suggests Kepler was not a naturally compelling lecturer: his mathematics classes at Graz reportedly drew very few students, and by his second year none at all, forcing him to teach other subjects like Virgil and rhetoric to justify his salary. 

His written "voice," however, is extensively documented and offers the best window into how his mind worked: contemporaries and later historians describe his prose as notoriously fast-moving, digressive, and intellectually intense, frequently interrupting scientific argument with personal anecdotes, numerological asides, or excited exclamations about a new geometrical relationship. Kepler himself acknowledged this restless quality, explaining that he wrote as he did in order to "lighten the hard work and difficulty of a subject by mental relaxation," and his surviving letters reveal the same quick, associative, sometimes tangential energy that likely characterized his conversation. (8) (9)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Kepler's writings show flashes of dry wit, particularly in his astrological polemics, where he compared popular astrology to a "foolish daughter" dependent on her "wise mother," astronomy. He also wrote a satirical piece imagining a lunar-based perspective on Earth's astronomy, a device that reveals a playful, imaginative side balanced against his more severe scientific temperament. (10)

RELATIONSHIPS Kepler married twice. On April 27, 1597, he married his first wife, Barbara Mühleck (Müller), then 23, in a match arranged by friends and matchmakers; the marriage was reportedly unhappy owing to her difficult temperament, and she bore him five children, only two of whom survived, before her death in 1611.

Oil on copper portraits of Kepler and his wife, Barbara, c. 1600

In 1613, at age 41, Kepler married Susanna Reuttinger, then 24, having methodically evaluated eleven proposed candidates before choosing her; this second marriage, which produced seven children of whom three died young, was said to be considerably happier. (11) (3)

MONEY AND FAME Kepler's income was frequently precarious, and he supplemented his salary throughout his career by casting horoscopes and almanac forecasts for patrons and clients, a practice he privately regarded with some disdain even as he relied on it financially. 

His scientific reputation grew steadily through his roles as Imperial Mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and adviser to General Wallenstein, though fame did not translate into lasting financial security, and he died while traveling to collect debts owed to him. (12)

FOOD AND DRINK Kepler was born and raised in the wine-growing region of Swabia, and his father kept a tavern in which the young Johannes reportedly worked as a pot-boy for a period after being withdrawn from school. (13)

His adult habits leaned toward austerity, driven as much by chronic financial hardship as personal taste: in a startlingly candid self-portrait written at age 25, comparing himself to a dog, Kepler noted that his own appetites were dog-like — "he liked gnawing on bones and dry crusts of bread, and was so greedy that whatever he saw he grabbed; yet like a dog he drinks little and is content with the simplest food." Chronic stomach ailments and fevers plagued him throughout his life, though no surviving source directly links these complaints to specific foods or to alcohol. (14)

MUSIC AND ARTS Kepler held a lifelong fascination with music, which played a central role in his astronomical theory of celestial harmony. In Harmonice Mundi, he mapped the movements and speed ratios of planets to musical intervals, arguing that planetary motion follows music's template; for example, the ratio between Jupiter's maximum speed and Mars's minimum speed corresponds to a minor third, while that between Earth and Venus corresponds to a minor sixth. (1)

LITERATURE Kepler is sometimes described as a father of science fiction for his novel Somnium (The Dream), which imagined a journey to the Moon and used the device to explain astronomical principles from a lunar viewpoint. It was published posthumously in 1634

He also wrote extensively in Latin across astronomy, optics, and mathematics, and left behind a substantial body of personal correspondence that offers rare insight into his inner life. (10)

Reproduction of 1634 title page of Somnium (The Dream)

NATURE Kepler held a deep awe for the natural world, viewing the entire cosmos as a reflection of an underlying divine and mathematical harmony. 

He integrated his religious convictions directly into his understanding of nature, regarding the Sun as a physical image of God's power and light. This philosophical view drove his exploration of geometry, the five regular polyhedra, and the close packing of spheres, which he applied to explain natural structures like the hexagonal shape of honeycomb cells. 

Alongside his broader planetary work, Kepler investigated a wide array of natural phenomena, studying atmospheric optics, the mechanics of human eyesight, and snow crystal structures, the latter leading to his pioneering 1611 treatise On the Six-Cornered Snowflake. (5) (15)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Kepler's chronic ill health, including weak eyesight and general physical frailty, ruled out strenuous physical activity, and his intellectual energies were absorbed almost entirely by mathematics, astronomy, and astrology. He did, however, pursue practical inventive projects as something of a side interest, including efforts to design and patent an improved water pump. (5)

ASTRONOMY Johannes Kepler spent roughly forty years making a career out of trying to persuade the heavens to behave mathematically. It was not a straightforward undertaking. He worked through religious persecution, political upheaval, financial uncertainty and, for several years, the deeply irritating planet Mars. Yet from this rather unpromising mixture emerged the three laws of planetary motion that helped transform astronomy into modern science.

Kepler's professional career began in a slightly unexpected place: not an observatory, but a classroom. In April 1594, aged 23, he took a post teaching mathematics at the Protestant school in Graz, Austria. His original ambition had been to become a Lutheran minister, but life, as it occasionally does, had other plans.

While in Graz he produced his first important work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). Kepler proposed that the distances between the planets could be explained by nesting the five Platonic solids — a wonderfully elaborate solution to a problem that, unfortunately for him, nature had not actually set. The idea was wrong, but it demonstrated his fierce commitment to the Copernican model of a Sun-centred universe.

Kepler's Platonic solid model of the Solar System, from Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596)

Graz was becoming increasingly uncomfortable for Protestants, however, and by 1600 the pressure had become impossible to ignore. Kepler refused to convert to Catholicism, and he and his family were effectively expelled. He therefore packed up and moved to Prague, which was already home to one of Europe's most remarkable astronomers.

That astronomer was Tycho Brahe, the Danish nobleman with an enormous collection of astronomical observations and, by all accounts, an enormous personality to go with it.

Kepler joined Brahe near Prague in 1600. His principal assignment was to investigate the orbit of Mars, which was proving particularly troublesome. Mars had the unfortunate habit of refusing to fit neatly into the circular planetary orbits that astronomers had been using for centuries. Kepler was given Brahe's observations and set about making sense of them.

He did not have long with his new employer. Brahe died unexpectedly in October 1601, leaving Kepler with something far more valuable than a comfortable working relationship: access to the painstaking observations that would eventually unlock the true shape of the planetary orbits.

After Brahe's death, Kepler succeeded him as Imperial Mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, an extraordinarily prestigious appointment. It also gave him access to the observations he needed for his increasingly obsessive investigation of Mars.

The next twelve years were astonishingly productive. Kepler published Astronomiae Pars Optica (1604), an important study of optics; De Stella Nova (1606), concerning the new star, or supernova, he had observed in 1604; and Astronomia Nova (1609), which contained his first two laws of planetary motion.

The great breakthrough was that planets did not travel in perfect circles after all. Their orbits were ellipses, with the Sun occupying one focus. This sounds obvious now, but Kepler reached it only after years of calculations, revisions, false starts and what has become known as his "war with Mars." It was, in effect, a six-year argument with a planet, and Mars was winning for much of it.

Kepler also made important advances in optics. His Dioptrice (1611) helped explain the discoveries being made with telescopes and described the design of what became known as the Keplerian telescope.

The death of Rudolf II in 1612 brought another change. Kepler moved to Linz in Upper Austria, where he became district and provincial mathematician. He remained there until 1626, although political and religious turmoil made the place progressively less congenial.

Despite the troubles, Kepler continued working. In 1618 he discovered his third law of planetary motion: the square of a planet's orbital period is proportional to the cube of its average distance from the Sun. He published it in Harmonice Mundi in 1619.

He also produced the Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae (1618–1621), a systematic presentation of Copernican astronomy incorporating all three laws. The work became influential throughout Europe and helped establish the mathematical framework that would later prove so useful to Isaac Newton.

Eventually, however, religious and political upheaval associated with the Counter-Reformation made life in Linz untenable. In 1626 Kepler moved on again, this time to Ulm.

In Ulm, Kepler finally completed one of the projects that had occupied him for years. In 1627 he published the Rudolphine Tables, combining Tycho Brahe's extraordinarily precise observations with Kepler's new mathematical model of elliptical planetary orbits.

The result was the most accurate set of astronomical tables yet produced. It was also a fitting culmination of the unlikely partnership between Brahe, the great observer, and Kepler, the man who spent years trying to make sense of what Brahe had observed. One supplied the numbers; the other supplied the explanation. Science has rarely looked so much like a very long group project.

From 1628 Kepler also served as an adviser to General Albrecht von Wallenstein during the Thirty Years' War. Among other things, he provided astrological calculations for his patron, a reminder that even one of the founders of modern astronomy lived in a world where astronomy and astrology had not yet completely gone their separate ways.

Kepler's career ended, rather unglamorously in 1630, when he died in Regensburg while travelling to collect money that was owed to him. After a lifetime spent calculating the movements of planets, he was still having difficulty getting people on Earth to pay their bills.

Across four turbulent decades, Kepler had transformed astronomy. The old system had insisted that the heavens must move in perfect circles because circles were considered philosophically superior. Kepler eventually abandoned the philosophy in favour of what the observations were actually telling him. The planets travelled in ellipses, at changing speeds, according to mathematical relationships that could be measured and tested.

It was a decisive change in the way humanity understood the universe. Kepler supplied the laws; Newton would later explain the force behind them. Together, they helped turn astronomy from a subject in which the heavens were expected to conform to elegant assumptions into a science in which the heavens were allowed, at last, to have the last word. 

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kepler made fundamental contributions to mathematics and optics. He developed early methods of integration (infinitesimal calculations) to compute the volumes of wine barrels (Nova Stereometria Doliorum), which contributed to the later development of calculus. 

In optics, he correctly explained how light enters the human eye, how the retina projects inverted images, and how lenses correct near-sightedness and far-sightedness. 

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Brought up in the Protestant faith, Kepler had originally intended to become a minister before circumstances led him toward mathematics and astronomy instead. He believed his scientific discoveries revealed the divine order underlying the universe, famously stating, "Science is thinking God's thoughts after him," and he wrote of his convictions, "I believe only and alone in the service of Jesus Christ. In him is all refuge and solace." He remarked that his discoveries "may well wait a century for a reader, as God has waited 6,000 years for an observer," reflecting his confidence that his work served a divine as well as scientific purpose. (16) (17)

POLITICS Kepler operated largely within the patronage system of the Holy Roman Empire, serving as Imperial Mathematician under Emperor Rudolf II and his successors, and later as an adviser to General Wallenstein during the Thirty Years' War, providing astronomical calculations for Wallenstein's astrologers. As a Protestant working within a predominantly Catholic imperial court, he navigated considerable religious and political tension throughout his career, particularly as the confessional conflicts of the era intensified. 

SCANDAL In 1615, at the height of his scientific career, Kepler's mother Katharina was accused of witchcraft in Leonberg. Her defense initially relied on local lawyers, and the trial dragged on for years through delays and procedural complications until, in 1620, a concerned Kepler took a more active role, using his scholarly connections to gather evidence refuting the charges and writing letters and petitions on her behalf. Katharina was ultimately acquitted in 1621, narrowly avoiding execution at the stake, though she died just six months later, reportedly worn down by the ordeal. (17)

MILITARY RECORD Kepler was closely connected to military affairs through his role as an adviser to General Wallenstein from 1628 onward during the Thirty Years' War, supplying astrological and astronomical calculations relevant to Wallenstein's campaigns. (7)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kepler was sickly from birth as a premature child and nearly died of smallpox around age four, an illness that left him with crippled hands and permanently impaired, multiple vision. 

Throughout his life he suffered from headaches, sensitivity to cold, hemorrhoids that made calculation while seated difficult, and other chronic ailments, some of which historians have suggested may have included an element of hypochondria. He was also reportedly reluctant to bathe, going as long as eight years at one point before his first wife persuaded him to do so. (3) (18)

HOMES Kepler's life was markedly itinerant, shaped by religious upheaval and shifting patronage: he lived successively in Weil der Stadt, Leonberg, Tübingen, Graz, Prague, and later Linz, before his final years took him to Ulm, Sagan, and finally Regensburg. This constant relocation reflected the instability of Protestant scholars working within the religiously and politically fractured Holy Roman Empire during the era of the Thirty Years' War. 

House of Kepler and Barbara Müller in Gössendorf, near Graz (1597–1599) by Mrbeachguide

TRAVEL Kepler's travels were largely dictated by his career and patronage, taking him from Graz to Prague to work with Tycho Brahe in 1600, and later to Linz and other imperial territories as his position and the ongoing war required. His final journey, in 1630, took him to Regensburg to collect interest owed to him on Austrian bonds, a trip from which he never returned. (12)

In 1608, he introduced the concept of solar sails, writing: "Provide ships or sails adapted to the heavenly breezes, and there will be some who will brave even that void."

DEATH Johannes Kepler died in the southeastern German city of Regensburg on November 15, 1630, at the age of 58, apparently following a brief feverish illness. His burial site in Regensburg was lost after Swedish forces destroyed the churchyard during the ongoing Thirty Years' War, and only his own self-composed poetic epitaph survives: "I measured the skies, now the shadows I measure / Skybound was the mind, earthbound the body rests." (17)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA  Kepler has been featured across modern media and scientific tributes:

Film: The biographical film Johannes Kepler (1974) produced in East Germany, and the 2002 film Eye of the Astronomer.

Literature: John Banville's 1981 historical novel Kepler, which dramatizes his life and scientific struggles.

Spaceflight: NASA named its planet-hunting space telescope the Kepler Space Telescope, launched in 2009 to search for exoplanets.

Astronomy: Features named in his honor include the lunar crater Kepler, the Martian crater Kepler, and the asteroid 1134 Kepler.

ACHIEVEMENTS Kepler's three laws of planetary motion remain foundational to modern astronomy and provided one of the essential building blocks for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation. 

He also advanced the science of optics through his work on the Keplerian telescope and the study of light within the eye.

Kepler wrote what is considered an early work of science fiction in Somnium, 

He anticipated the modern concept of solar sails more than three centuries before their practical realization.