As reported a few days ago, Nic is on the cover of the new issue of Marie Claire UK, and we now have more coverage from the spread!! Marie Claire have released excerpts from the interview, plus the new photoshoot … which is gorgeous! You can see it all at marieclaire.co.uk, and I’ve added the photos to our Gallery. Further down this post are a few articles about the interviews, and some select quotes.

I bought the magazine today, and it is a fantastic spread. The interview is good (as is often the case with Marie Claire), and Nicole talks very candidly about her first marriage, the effect the divorce had on her and how she recovered from it to find love again, botox, death, her eldest children, and more. It’s a really interesting read.

Thanks go to Ridhi from Marie Claire UK for her email and a HQ photo!

Nicole Kidman on her near death experience
She goes on to tell me about the near-death experience she faced five years ago when the helicopter she was travelling in dropped out of the skies. No one knows about this, she confides. ‘The engine stopped and everyone was screaming and I became unbelievably calm. The pilot panicked, people panicked, but I just went, “OK, this is what’s going to be. Please don’t make it too painful.”’ The pilot landed safely but, apart from being ‘grateful to be walking this earth’, the ordeal was an awakening. ‘Maybe it was the shock that made me so calm, but I love it when I surprise myself and see what I’m made of. I suppose that’s what I call discovering who I am.’

Nicole Kidman on Partying
Has she ever partied hard? ‘I’m Australian,’ she smiles. ‘There are times when I have to go and play, but I don’t drink. It’s a supporting thing and not really a big ask. Certainly when I was younger, I wanted to experience everything. So I did. But my imagination is so powerful I have to be careful how I use it. I can make myself believe anything. That’s how I act.’ Her answer prompts me to impudently ask whether she’s tried magic mushrooms. ‘I refuse to answer that! I’ll see it on the cover of the next tabloid. But sure, I’ve lived my life.’

• Marie Claire (UK) – March 2011 x1
• 2011 – Session #006 x5

Exclusive: Nicole Kidman talks to Marie Claire

She’s a world-famous movie icon, and our March issue cover star – Nicole Kidman opens up to Marie Claire on her high-profile Hollywood relationships, and how she’s ‘crazy in love’…

With a Best Actress Oscar nomination for new movie Rabbit Hole under her belt, and the recent announcement that she’s celebrating the birth of her second biological child – via a surrogate – it’s little surprise that Nicole Kidman is feeling rather content with life at present.

Married to musician Keith Urban, the pair have another biological daughter together – Sunday Rose, now two – and live in a remote 36-acre homestead in Tennessee.

‘I’m crazy in love,’ she told us. ‘I think you can live anywhere and do anything when you’re crazy in love.’

But, ‘I wouldn’t have been able to do this in my Twenties,’ she confessed.

‘I was a gypsy for so long, living out of a suitcase and sort of dragging Bella and Connor around with me,’ – Bella and Connor being her two adopted children from her previous marriage to Tom Cruise – now aged 18 and 15 respectively.

The star also candidly spoke out about that Hollywood relationship, which saw her shoot to fame all those years ago, and described the personal sacrifices that she felt she had to make in order to be Mrs Tom Cruise.

‘That was a great relationship. It was great,’ she said. ‘I think it ran its course.’

‘I was never seeking to be a celebrity. But I was prepared to do that for love. And that is something that is hard to do.

‘It’s hard when you’re young. But I’m ready to give up anything for love, because ultimately, that is what you have.’

The 43-year-old also admitted that she found the high-profile marriage breakdown a struggle.

‘I was really damaged and not sure whether that was ever going to happen again to me,’ she told us. ‘I certainly never thought I’d have a baby at 41. But we never know what’s around the corner.’

But, hurt and divorce aside, ultimately she argues that the notion of falling in love is what drives her.

‘I’m very driven by falling in love,’ she said. ‘I fall in love and I’ll drop everything and change everything.’

Read the full interview with Nicole in the March issue of Marie Claire, out now.

Nicole Kidman claims she has never gone under a surgeon’s knife, despite being dubbed the frozen face of Hollywood.

The porcelain white star also insists her anti-ageing Botox injections are in the past.

‘I didn’t like it, so I’ve gone back to my own forehead. But I’ve never had plastic surgery on my face. People say I have but I haven’t,’ she says.

Turning to her love life, the 43-year-old tells Marie Claire magazine that her split from husband Tom Cruise in 2001 left her ‘really damaged’.
Marie Claire is out on Thursday

Searching for a silver lining, she says: ‘We were very, very tight and that’s why we lasted ten years, which is a good amount of time, particularly when you get married at 23. That was a great relationship. I think it ran its course.’

The Rabbit Hole actress also reveals that a helicopter scare put her life in perspective.

‘The engine stopped. The pilot panicked, people panicked, but I just went, “OK, this is what’s going to be. Please don’t make it too painful,”’ Kidman reveals.

‘I love it when I surprise myself and see what I’m made of.’

However, she won’t be drawn on her attitude towards drugs. Asked if she has dabbled with magic mushrooms, she says: ‘I refuse to answer that! I’ll see it on the cover of the next tabloid. But sure, I’ve lived my life.’

Read the full interview in the new issue of Marie Claire, out Thursday.

Nicole Kidman, the actress, has dismissed suggestions that she and her former husband, Tom Cruise, were the “hottest couple in Hollywood”.

Speaking in the March edition of ‘Marie Claire’ magazine, Kidman, 43, said: “You don’t think of yourself like that. I knew he was a really big star, but after a while, to get to a real place in a relationship, that has to wear off.”

“As a couple we were very private. I was never seeking to be a celebrity, but I was prepared to do that for love.”

Kidman and Cruise met in December 1989 on the set of their movie ‘Days of Thunder’. They married on Christmas Eve 1990 but divorced in 2001.