The groundbreaking 1960s photographer Diane Arbus — whose haunting portraits of American families, freaks and misfits inspired a generation of artists — has been a tantalizing subject in Hollywood for years, with Diane Keaton at one point mentioned as the actress most likely to play her. But Nicole Kidman got the part, and before you say, “Huh?” remember what people said when they first heard she was going to play Virginia Woolf.

There are many reasons to look forward to “Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus,” the movie about the photographer’s early life and career that will arrive in November. One, surely, is to see whether Kidman can successfully morph into yet another famously complicated, troubled woman (Arbus took her own life in 1971). But another is director Steven Shainberg, whose 2002 “Secretary” starred Maggie Gyllenhaal as a masochistic clerical assistant. The film — funny, scary, provocative and finally kind of sweet — was a small triumph of formal virtuosity and tonal control. With Shainberg at the helm, “Arbus” promises to transcend the usual formulaic tripe of the Hollywood biopic.

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As every actress of a certain age knows, the proper lighting can work wonders for you. Whether 39-year-old Nicole Kidman feels she needs this treatment just yet is unknown.

But when the Hollywood star booked into a suite at the Dorchester Hotel in London, she asked staff for all the lightbulbs to be changed from 60 watts to 40 watts.

The softer lighting was one of several requests Ms Kidman is said to have made in the £1,700-a-night suite where she is staying with her new husband, Keith Urban, while she shoots a film.

She is also said to have requested an air humidifier, and had a running machine installed, along with an exercise machine known as a wobble board, although this was denied by her spokeswoman.

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Sexy thriller Eyes Wide Shut ended Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s marriage because the couple’s characters were too close for comfort, according to a new Kidman biography.

In his new study, Nicole Kidman, film historian David Thomson claims the former couple held a mirror up to their relationship issues when they signed up for the 1999 Stanley Kubrick film.

Thomson says, “I think she learned from him just what was required in taking charge of yourself. That’s what broke them up.

“She realized she could be as big as him if she became as strong and self-centered. He wanted a beautiful, bright, obedient consort. She wanted a teacher. It worked. Then it stopped.

“I think Eyes Wide Shut was the process that brought it to an end because the characters they played were so close to themselves.”

Nicole Kidman’s spokesperson Catherine Olim has insisted that magazines paying for images of Nicole looking pregnant are wasting their money.

Nicole has been plagued with rumours that she’s expecting since she started dating now-husband Keith Urban but Olim insists it’s just lies and fakery on behalf of the paparazzi.

After one magazine paid $20,000 for a photo of “pregnant” Nicole, Olim told MSNBC: “[I’m] afraid they wasted their money. [Nicole’s] not pregnant.” Olim

“[Nicole wouldn’t be] shooting a film, traveling to Rome for another film, then shooting another film if she were.”

“Incidentally, I’m virtually certain paparazzi are distorting photos to make her look pregnant. I’ve seen her, she’s her regular slender self.”

Nicole Kidman’s rep insists that the star isn’t pregnant, but Keith Urban fans are saying that lyrics on his new album suggest that he’s expecting to have two children.

Urban wrote the romantic tune, “Once In A Lifetime,” in which he apparently croons to his bride Kidman and sings of their children.

“I close my eyes and I see you standing there saying, ‘I do’ and they’re throwing rice in our hair,” he sings, then turns his attention to their kiddies: “Well, the first one’s born then a brother comes along/And he’s got your smile.”

“The lyrics are already fueling speculation that Kidman’s growing bump is more than just weight gain,” reports The Star, which quotes a “friend” of Kidman as saying, “Nicole is keeping her lips zipped about whether she’s pregnant or not, but if you ask her about Keith writing that they’re going to have two kids, she just says, ‘That would be lovely.’”

Kidman’s rep last week told The Scoop that the actress is not expecting and that she believes photos of Kidman looking pregnant are digitally altered.

JUST months after marrying Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman has come under fire in an unauthorised biography depicting the actress as too self-obsessed to give herself to a husband.

The Hollywood heavyweight has been left feeling manipulated by the book’s author, US film critic David Thomson, because she was unaware the project would be published in the form of an explosive biography.

“Nicole has never met David Thomson – she has only spoken to him briefly on the phone about her acting processes and various films,” Kidman’s agent Wendy Day told Confidential yesterday.

“He’s a well-respected film writer and she accepted to the interview only because she was under the impression he was writing a series of film essays.”

But Nicole Kidman, which hit US shelves this week, paints the actress as a power-hungry fame seeker who used her 10-year marriage to Tom Cruise to hit the Hollywood big time.

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Author’s obsession with the actress pays off in an entertaining romp through her life and career that’s also a smart commentary on celeb culture.

In his eccentric, compulsively readable new book, Nicole Kidman, film critic David Thomson takes us through the life and career of the Oscar-winning actress, film by film, magazine cover by magazine cover. Thomson — who confessed to a deep crush on Kidman in his previous book, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood — resorts to the usual biography-of-an-artist tricks: He obsesses over the childhood details that might have informed Kidman’s adult life; he extrapolates wildly on seemingly simple statements she has given to the press; he tries to discern clues to her real life from her on-screen performances.

But Thomson also goes much further than conventional biographers, by trying to locate Kidman within the context of our celebrity-obsessed contemporary culture. An entire chapter is devoted to Kidman’s appearance on the cover of Italian GQ; another lingers on a Lagerfeld dress she chose for a red-carpet event. (“[T]he off-white of the dress, the bone-white dazzle of her shoulders, and the blondness of her hair were so integrated as to be nearly spiritual,” he writes.) Thomson tries to create meaning from ephemera — the photo shoots, the dresses, the blockbusters — and, amazingly, he succeeds. Maybe that’s because, for the modern celebrity, the ephemera is all they (and we) have to cling to.

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A war of words has erupted between two Italian film festivals about a planned appearance by Nicole Kidman.

Kidman, who will attend the opening of her film Fur at the Rome Cinemafest on October 13, has attracted the ire of Venice Film Festival organisers.

The director of the Venice Film Festival, Marco Muller, has claimed neither his festival or Cannes wanted Kidman’s film anyway.

“I’ve got no fear of the Rome Cinemafest because they are only screening films that neither Cannes nor Venice wanted,” Muller told reporters, after Rome organisers broke an agreement by announcing their film line-up ahead of the Venice event.

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PLEASE NOTE: This quote has been taken out of context and used in a sensationalised story. Nicole was simply pointing out the fact that Angelina gets more publicity because she is a celebrity, and if she is “slamming” anyone or thing, it is the way the media works.

If there’s one person not too impressed with all the publicity Angelina Jolie gets for her work as a UN ambassador, it would be actress Nicole Kidman.

The Oscar winning Aussie beauty is reported to have said that even though Jolie was doing no more than any nurse in a hospital, she was still getting more attention just because she was famous.

“It’s not like Angelina is any better than a nurse working in a hospital but she’s getting the publicity for her contribution,” Femalefirst quoted her, as telling Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper.

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It was a smart move for Picturehouse’s Bob Berney to unveil Steve Shainberg’s Fur at Telluride. This delicate piece would have been lost at Toronto or Venice. It will have its official premiere in Rome, which was willing to pay the freight of bringing the gang, including Nicole Kidman, over. Venice wasn’t.

I was expecting a weird movie about a woman photographing freaks and instead saw an exquisitely crafted love story. It played well for the Telluride crowd this morning, which tends toward the older art-house side. Instead of making a conventional Diane Arbus biopic, New Yorker Shainberg, who grew up with her photos in his house because his novelist uncle was friends with Arbus, has crafted an imaginative portrait of the period in her life when Arbus, 35, took a dive off the deep end. She stopped assisting her husband in his portrait studio and started taking her own photographs. How did that transformation happen?

Shainberg and his screenwriter-collaborator Erin Cressida Wilson took off from Patricia Bosworth’s biography and threw Arbus (played by Nicole Kidman in tightly cinched 50s dresses) down the rabbit hole and into a wonderland peopled by freaks like Robert Downey, Jr., a man completely covered with hair. (He’s a fictional construct based on a real person who Arbus never met.) It works. It’s no surprise that the team that created the sadomasochistic romance in Secretary would dig into Arbus’s strange universe with zest and glee. But many will want the movie to delve less into this woman’s escape from bourgeois convention and more into exploring her iconic photography. “That would have been boring,” Shainberg insisted at the Q & A this morning. “You already know about that.”