A nose ahead
January 26th 2003

Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf represents big steps for the actor, professionally and personally, writes Phillip McCarthy.

The big buzz about Nicole Kidman’s turn in The Hours is that she so thoroughly transforms herself into her character, the iconic 20th-century literary figure Virginia Woolf, that a lot of people who see the movie don’t even realise it’s her.

To capture the suicidal, early 20th-century writer, she deepens and darkens her voice, she slows her leggy gait to a hesitant shuffle, she wears dowdy clothes and gray flat hair and, most controversially, she dons a prosthetic nose.

The net effect is that, in the midst of the awards season, Kidman is basking in the accolade of being not just a movie star but an actor’s actor.

Could Julia or Meg, so the buzz goes, so completely immerse themselves in a character?

Given that The Hours is a prestige project with a huge amount of Oscar heat to it – Kidman has already got a slew of critics’ awards and a Golden Globe best actress gong for it – it makes for a pretty powerful calling card at the Academy after last year’s Moulin Rouge and The Others.

“I became pretty obsessed with her,” Kidman says.

“During the filming in the English countryside, I lived in this little cottage in Richmond and I spent a lot time reading her work and listening to tapes of her voice. I was in a fairly solitary state of mind at the time so it made sense.

“What the movie is about is how a writer can impact you, even if she’s dead, and I found that out in a very personal way as I looked into her relationships and what she wrote.

Read the rest of this entry »

2002/3 was not just a great year for Nic, The Aussie Sun Herald write that it was a good year for women in cinema on the whole. Do you agree?

It’s a dame’s world in Hollywood
February 10th 2003

The remarkable increase in chicks storming Hollywood flicks has turned the industry on its head, Phillip McCarthy writes.

At first glance the two hottest Oscar prospects this year, Chicago and The Hours, couldn’t be more different. One is a glitzy musical big on cynicism and sass. The other is a well-mannered riff on the power and durability of iconic literary whiz Virginia Woolf.

Between them the two films dominated the Golden Globes last month, and that boozy extravaganza usually acts as a formguide to the Oscars next month.

But the two films do have a couple of telling features in common. The first is structural, but the second might be a signal that things really are changing in Hollywood. Both The Hours and Chicago are what, in the theatre, are called three-handers: the narrative, the feel and the ultimate success rests on three central actors.

So what else do they have in common? Of those six central actors, five are women.

Count them. The Hours has Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep, and Chicago has Renee Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones. The sole male in the equation is Richard Gere.

Read the rest of this entry »

Long-time fans will remember Oprah Winfrey’s classic interview with Nic, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep on her show back in 2002, and here is the transcript interview that appeared in Oprah’s January 2003 magazine:

Oprah Talks to Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore

Three extraordinary actresses get together with Oprah for a revelatory conversation about making movies, children, getting older, their “raging insecurity,” and their transcendent new project.

The second after I saw The Hours —a masterful new movie that connects the lives of three women living at different times in the 20th century—I called Nicole Kidman to congratulate her on one of the most brilliant performances I’d seen in years. Soon after, I invited Nicole and her costars—Meryl Streep, who’s inspired a generation of actresses, and the incredibly talented Julianne Moore, whose range spans everything from The Lost World to Anton Chekhov—to join me for tea. Nearly two years after they started shooting the film (based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize– winning novel), we talked about the way The Hours affected them, why one of them almost backed out of her role, how they balance motherhood and filmmaking—and the truth about aging in Hollywood.

Oprah: I know The Hours is a day in the life of three women in three separate worlds and times—but what is this movie really about?

Julianne: Universality. Each character’s life layers on the others’, and in the end, there’s this incredible impact of how universal all the moments—the hours—of our lives are.

Meryl: My mother died a year ago, and I’ve just now been able to bring myself to sort through her things. I discovered a photo I’d never seen—a picture of my grandmother with her three sisters and mother. All the women were wearing these high lace collars in 1903, yet looking at my grandmother was like looking into the face of my own child. So I’m always interested in lifting the humanity from the dead pages of history. For instance, when we see a photograph of Virginia Woolf, her soul seems so available on her face, but there were many secrets, too. What great literature does is bring that humanity up until it beats in your own breast, and we feel what Virginia Woolf felt. For me this film was a telescoping of time and emotion and how connected we are—deep down, we’re all very similar.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nic talks about “The Nose” in this short interview from 2002:

‘Hours’ of makeup for Kidman
SF Gate, December 27th 2002

Talk about a tough job. Makeup artists had to transform Nicole Kidman into the homely novelist Virginia Woolf for “The Hours,” a task that took three hours a day. The key was a large prosthetic nose that rendered Kidman virtually unrecognizable.

“I did enjoy being anonymous,” the star told me. “It was fun to be able to go out of my trailer and not have anyone know me.” Still, she was shocked to find that preview audiences sat through the movie without realizing it was her.

It must have been liberating not to rely on her looks because Kidman gives an Oscar-worthy performance. “I felt myself opening up. I’ve always had a lot of things bubbling inside of me, but for whatever reason I didn’t allow them to come out. At the moment I am willing to expose myself and give, like, blood.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a very recent interview with the BBC from a few weeks ago when Nic was promoting Stoker, in which she talks a bit about her Oscar win for The Hours:

Here is a fascinating article from The Hours author Michael Cunningham about his time on the set of the movie adaptation of his book. I particularly liked reading his thoughts and comments about Nicole’s transformation into Virginia…

On the Bloomsbury set
January 25th 2003

Michael Cunningham agonised for Hours when Hollywood took on his novel, but it all had a happy ending.

It seemed at one moment I was sitting at my desk wondering if anyone would want to read The Hours, my unorthodox novel in which Virginia Woolf was a prominent character, and the next I was on a set outside London, being asked by an assistant director if I’d like to stick around and see Nicole Kidman in her Virginia Woolf nose.

Like any sensible person, I said yes.

I have, over the past year and a half, had the distinctly surreal experience of seeing The Hours turned into a movie involving many of the most brilliant actors alive. The cast is dizzying: Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Dillane, Allison Janney, John C. Reilly, Miranda Richardson and, briefly, as a clerk in a flower shop, the great Eileen Atkins, whose portrayal of Virginia Woolf in the play Vita and Virginia helped shape my own sense of how to write about Woolf.

Like any large experience, it has been heady and strange and more than a little upsetting. Before the movie deal was made, people sometimes asked me what actors I imagined playing my characters, and the only response I could offer was this: I have such a cogent image of these people that they’d have to play themselves. I can’t picture them on any terms other than their own. Who, after all, would play your mother in the film version of her life? Your mother would have to do it. No one else is remotely like her.

So it was with a mix of elation and uncertainty that I greeted the news that the three main characters in The Hours, the movie, would be played by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. I had no doubts about these women’s abilities but wondered if they’d be too thoroughly themselves, no matter how accomplished their performances.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an interesting interview with The Hours scriptwriter David Hare:

‘Hours’ writer Hare composes a script in three-part harmony
January 19th 2003

“The Hours” may look like the consummate chick flick — starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep — but it’s really a thriller in disguise.

“At some level, ‘The Hours’ is a thriller, meaning that it’s about the withholding or giving of information, which is basically what thrillers are about,” says David Hare, the screenwriter who did the seemingly impossible and turned the lyrical Michael Cunningham novel, with its three interwoven strands, into a movie.

“It’s got that thing, that you don’t understand why you’re watching three different things, and then slowly, you begin to understand, just like a thriller. And the fun of it is to pit your wits against the filmmakers’. ‘Hang on, I begin to see what the connections are here.’ ”

Hare knew he didn’t want to tick off moviegoers by being needlessly obscure; at the same time, he couldn’t be too obvious. He wanted to preserve some of the mystery about how the dots connect. “The rate at which you reveal the information is how the film works,” and it’s the reappearance of a character near the end that allows “all the tumblers to click,” he says from rainy San Francisco, where he’s just landed for a publicity whirl.

Read the rest of this entry »

Interview of the week: Nicole Kidman
United Press International, November 21st 2002

Actress Nicole Kidman says at least one good thing was born of the stress accompanying her well-publicized break-up with Tom Cruise: It helped her prepare for the role of doomed writer Virginia Woolf in “The Hours,” the screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

“(Production on the film) was at a time in my life where I was raw enough to do it, and everything came together, but it was frightening at times,” Kidman recently admitted.

Widely recognized as one of the world’s most beautiful women, the 35-year-old Australian completely transformed her looks to play the plain-looking early-20th-century feminist, writer and critic.

Complimented for her courage in doing so, the actress demurred: “I didn’t feel bold. I just felt I got this opportunity to go and do something I’ve never done before; to exist within a character in a completely different way. But it was strange because we had a small crew it’s a small film. So, you didn’t quite feel, ‘Oh, my God, this could really be a disaster if it doesn’t work.’” Now I look back and think, ‘What was I thinking?’ Because if I stepped on the screen and everyone had laughed then the whole film doesn’t work.”

In fact, Kidman confessed she was so nervous about playing the part while trying to sort out her relationship woes that she even tried to quit the project.

“I tried to pull out,” she revealed. “I have to say I wasn’t as bold as you might think. I actually called my agent and said: ‘I can’t do this. I don’t want to work. This isn’t the right thing. It’s too much at this stage. I just need to sort of hibernate.’ And he and my friends all said: ‘Get on the plane and go. Go do it and get lost in it.”

Read the rest of this entry »

After the ceremony in which Nic received her star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame back on January 13th 2003, Paramount (the studio behind The Hours) held an evening discussion event with Nicole and a select audience. We already had a few photos from this event, but I’ve now been able to add 8 beautiful HQ photos from it! I’ve tried to find some information/articles/quotes from the event, but unfortunately have not had any luck. Still, enjoy these lovely new-but-old photos

• Paramount Presents ‘An Evening With Nicole Kidman’ x8 HQs

“Writers, please keep writing for us because we’re very interesting. And directors, please keep giving us complicated wonderful types of women for the screen.” - Nicole talking about roles for women, at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards

Continuing on with our The Hours themed updates, the gallery has been updated this weekend with more photos from the two events Nic attended in 2002 to promote the film. First up, I’ve replaced all of the photos from the press conference for The Hours with ones that have less intrusive tags on them, plus added a couple of additional HQs. Nic looked so beautiful and elegant at this press conference, and they are some of my favourite photos of her. Secondly, the Premiere Magazine’s Women In Hollywood Luncheon album has been updated with lots more HQ photos, some of which are HQ versions of pictures we previously only had in smaller resolutions.

If you have any requests for updates you’d like to see as part of our Movie Of The Month themes then just send me an email, post a comment here, or tweet us @NicolesMagic.

• Premiere Magazine’s Women In Hollywood Luncheon
• “The Hours” Press Conference