Biography :

Full Name :

Nicole Mary Kidman

Born :

20 June 1967 in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA.

Family :

Antonia Kidman-Hawley (sister)

Picture Janelle Kidman (mother) Anthony Kidman (father)

Tom Cruise (husband)

Height :

5' 10½" (180 cm)

Education :

St Martin's Youth Theatre, Melbourne, Australia Australian Theatre for Young People, Sydney, Australia Philip Street Theatre, majored in voice, production and theater history

 
N icole wasn't, as most people think, born in Australia but in Honolulu on Hawaii, where her father was working on a research project. Being born in the States, Nicole has dual citizenship, both Australian and American. The family spent the next three years in Washington D.C. while her dad contimued his research. "I have a vague recollection of its being very cold, with lots of snow," she says of those early years.  
 
By four, she and her parents moved back to the upper-middle-class Sydney suburb of Longueville, and she started in a ballet-class. Now joined by a three years younger sister, Antonia, she was, by her own admission, a rebellious kid, strong willed and strong-minded. She was in love with The Wizard of Oz, ballet and pantomimes. She made her stage debut at age six, playing one of the Virgin Mary's sheep in the school nativity play, outfitted in a homemade costume fashioned from a sheepskin carseat.
She started mime class at age eight, started taking drama school at ten. "My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination. I began keeping a diary, which I maintain to this day." By puberty, she towered above most of the other girls and boys in her class and was nicknamed "Stalky" or "Storky."
 
"My parents were always extremely supportive," Kidman has said. "They allowed me any artistic outlet I wanted." What she wanted was to lose herself in other characters. "Each weekend I'd go to the theatre at Phillip Street. I used to just lock myself in there for the whole weekend. I thought it was fantastic. I'd be teased a lot though, cause I'd be going off to the theatre, instead of going to the beach with the boys and all the girls. I felt like an outsider because of that." "I had my first kiss onstage; I had to yell, 'Beat me! Harder! Harder! Harder!' every night," she says of her professional stage debut, in Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening, about sexual repression in the late 1800s.
 
At fourteen, she landed her first professional role, as Petra in the TV movie Bush Christmas, an uplifting story of three dauntless kids who join with an aborigine to hunt the thieves who stole their horse. It was shortly followed by a role in BMX Bandits, an adventure where three young BMX bikers find a trove of two-way radios that belong to bank robbers. The chief robber sends two of his bumbling cohorts out to get the radios. In the 1983 ABC TV-series Winners, Nicole played a track star in high school who meets a new girl who is considered a bad influence and makes Nicole change her mind about making track the only thing she cares about.
 
Her skills were developing, but she lacked confidence to make full use of them. At seventeen she accepted a role in the Disney production, Five Mile Creek, which placed her in front of the camera five days a week for seven months and finally broke down her on-camera inhibitions.
 

Over the next two years, she had roles in five features; The TV Movie Matthew and Son, Archer's Adventure, the made-for-TV Room to Move, Wills & Burke, and finally in Windrider which premiered at Christmas 1986. Her major career breakthrough occurred in that same year, when she was offered the lead in the mini-series Vietnam. Her character, Megan Goddard, develops from an awkward schoolgirl of the Sixties into a freethinking twenty-four-year-old adult, protesting Australia's involvement in Vietnam in the early Seventies.

 
"I knew that Vietnam was going to be great. I knew because I'd worked with John Duigan (the director) before and because it was a Kennedy Miller production. I remember when they rang and said 'It's yours' I screamed, I was so excited. I knew then that I'd finally got a role that was three dimensional."
Vietnam contained the memorable 'radio station scene', where Nicole is protesting conscription on talk-back radio, when her brother, a recently returned Viet vet, rings in, and she breaks down listening to his voice. "Terry Hayes said he was watching that and decided he was going to write Dead Calm, and Vietnam led to me getting an American agent. It's opened so many doors for me."
 
"During the making of Vietnam, I had my own pad and was really on my own for the first time, doing cooking and housekeeping. It was my dream to have my own place and be my own person. And from then on, there was never the slightest doubt about the path I was going to follow. Win or lose, I was going to stick with acting." Then she had roles in the made for TV karate(!) film Night Master and the totally unknown The Bit Part.
She appeared as a sexually repressed senior in the bording-school drama Flirting, followed by Emerald City, before she was offered the film that would make her recognised internationally; the female lead in Dead Calm. The character of Rae Ingram was supposed to be in her midthirties, amazingly, Nicole gave a totally credible performance though she was only nineteen at the time.
 
"I focused all my energies on this part. This part was it for me, and I knew it. We filmed for three months, mostly at sea off the Great Barrier Reef. It was just brutal. We filmed from sunup to sundown. The weather was hot and sticky. We were all drained and exhausted.""We could have cast anyone in the world to play Rae" said director Phillip Noyce. "We had people like Debra Winger, and Sigourney Weaver in mind. But Terry kept drawing my attention to Nicole, and once I'd seen the scene from Vietnam that was it. "
"It's no coincidence that Terry, George Miller and myself all so firmly believed in this woman's ability that we were prepared to suffer the consequences of not having a 'name actor in the role!
 
After Dead Calm, Nicole took some time off, but returned after twelve months for the TV mini-series Bankok Hilton, about an Australian woman whilst travelling back from London to Australia via Thailand, makes friends with a photographer. She is tricked into carrying some luggage through Thai customs for him, only for the police to find drugs in his bag. She is sentenced to spend time in the horrific "Bangkok Hilton" prison. A marvellous performance once again.
She was at a film festival in Japan when she first got the call that Tom Cruise wanted to meet her for Days of Thunder. "I thought, Oh yeah, right, I'd been to America before. You go in, you audition, you don't get the job. But hey, free trip to L.A.!" So off she went, with vague plans to crash for a couple weeks at the Chateau Marmont with Phillip Noyce and his family before heading off to London, where her sister was living. She walked into a conference room with the star and producers of Days of Thunder, feeling slightly jet-lagged and discombobulated. "My first reaction to meeting Nic was pure lust," Cruise says. "It was totally physical." "When Tom stood up and we shook hands, I found I was looking down at him. It was terrifically embarrassing to learn I was at least a couple of inches taller. It wasn't that he was so short. It's more that I'm so tall - five eleven. I knew it simply wouldn't do, having the girlfriend tower over the macho race-car driver. There were five other men in the room, all staring. They gave me a couple of test pages of script to read, explaining that they had no real part in mind yet. I left thinking, Okay, at least I got to visit Los Angeles." The next morning, one of the producers called her and said the part was hers. "But what about my height?" she asked. "It doesn't bother Tom," he replied, "so it doesn't bother us."
 
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