For Kidman, life comes before art

Ellen McCarthy, Washington Post Sunday, November 25, 2007 found at sfgate.com

Nicole Kidman posed in New York in November 2007, about the Golden Compass film clips. Associated Press photo by Peter Kramer

In her 40th year, leading lady Nicole Kidman chose exactly two roles for herself.

Both of the characters are pathologically messed-up women who destroy the things that should be dearest to them. Both of them are mothers who make you want to reach through the screen and ferry their children into safer arms.

Kidman chose to work for all of two months and three weeks last year, and that's the body of work she chose.

Celebrity watchers are likely to do an awful lot of armchair analysis about what that means coming from a woman who has spent the past few years entrenched in the personal drama of becoming the former wife of Tom Cruise, marrying country singer Keith Urban and supporting her new husband through his stint in rehab for alcohol abuse, all while continuing to be one of the most famous names and faces in Hollywood. For her part, Kidman is happy to leave the psychoanalysis to others.

Acting is "a very, very small part of my life now," she says. "I mean, I live in Tennessee and have a place in Australia. I have a very separate life ... a very full, very rich life that extends far beyond the film industry."

If anything, the two roles she chose - in "Margot at the Wedding," which opened Wednesday, and next month's "The Golden Compass" - seem a testament to how far removed her professional life is from the rest of her existence.

In "Margot," the anticipated follow-up to writer-director Noah Baumbach's "The Squid and the Whale," Kidman plays an inept and emotionally abusive mother to a son on the verge of adolescence. In reality, she is public about her desire for another child, in addition to the two she adopted with Cruise.

In "The Golden Compass," the adaptation of Philip Pullman's first book in a children's adventure trilogy, she's the embodiment of evil, fiercely hungry for power, even if it comes at the expense of her young daughter. In reality, Kidman says she is striving for very little: "I'm really just trying to keep my husband and me ... in a little bubble."

Her choices, she says, are far more visceral than strategic.

"I don't sit around and go, 'Oh, I've got to find this or I've got to do that.' I just read and I respond," she says in a voice made hoarse and by a sinus infection. She is being ferried around Manhattan, her cell service fading in and out as horns blare in the background. It's hard to imagine a world less of her making. This, she says with a laugh, "is not my thing."

But playing characters that audiences are not likely to find endearing definitely is her thing.

"I think that's part of the great thing about making films where people aren't necessarily behaving in the way that's considered acceptable in our society," she says. "How do we look at that? How do we understand that? And does that give us more understanding and more compassion in a way?"

Kidman is hopeful that the entire "Golden Compass" trilogy will be made, so there's time for that character, too, to take on more depth and humanity.

"I just like the idea of being able to explore this larger-than-life mother who's done deplorable things, but ultimately you see the arc through the trilogy."

That she turned 40 this year means - probably more than anything - that she'll be asked, again and again, what that number means and what strategy she has devised to keep herself in top billing.

Even that line of questioning presumes something false about the actress: that she spends time thinking about it.

"I think your job as an actor is really just to stay carefree and be the dreamer. Everybody else can come up with the strategies," she says. "I suppose that comes with age, where you just really don't place as much emphasis on all of those ideas. That's not really where I'm at in my life - put it that way."

As for some of her more well-known flops, such as "The Stepford Wives" (2004) and "Bewitched" (2005), they are a reflection of life choices.

"I think I had a life that wasn't drawing me toward acting. I didn't have anything I wanted to say," she says.

Even now, when she does have things she wants to say, she knows her life choices may make that more difficult. Psychically and geographically, she is half a world away from Hollywood.

Tennessee, she says, has given her "a more laissez faire approach" to life. There she has a new community, a different pace, last-minute stops at late-night jam sessions and time to share the things she cares about with the people she cares about.

"I think it comes with falling in love," she says of her changing view of work and the world. "I think it comes with maturity. I think it comes with decisions that you've made about what level of success you desire and what's important in your life."