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