When the world's most famous actress came to London, she slipped her celebrity shackles to spend a few memorable nights on the town with GQ's Editor-at-Large. Between go-kart racing and betting his bottom dollar at the roulette table, Adrian Deevoy reveals how he fell in love with a woman called Nic.


You've got to start with her eyes, as they redefine the very concept of blue. Initially you're thinking azure but they're richer than that. Not quite china blue but that's closer. More liquid than aqua blue if such a thing were possible. Kind of powder blue with a suggestion of cobalt. Imagine baby blue but on a very world-weary baby and you're almost there. Anyway, they're quite the bluest things you've seen.


Strangely, the only eyes I've ever seen that even held a candle to these belonged to Bob Dylan. He mentioned them in a song once. The line, if memory serves, goes, "I've seen all these decoys through a set of deep turquoise eyes and I feel so depressed". So I'm thinking of this song which, funnily enough, is called "No Time To Think", the first time I see her eyes.


She's in an exclusive Italian restaurant in Belgravia with a group of friends. You can tell that they know each other well. There's no star treatment - they interrupt her as she speaks and drape their arms around her when telling a story. She is relaxed and tossing her head back and drinking wine in small sips.


I'm two tables away with a couple and the man is being very funny. He sees her before I do and launches into this rant about celebrity and why he has no respect for the whole caper and how he likes to spit on the ground every time he sees somebody famous. He makes as if to hawk up and at that moment, perhaps because we're laughing so hard, she looks across. She's laughing too and her eyes are glistening and dancing and sparking like flint.


It sounds ridiculous but we lock looks for the longest time. Each amused by something different but staring at each other. Me because she is the most recognisable actress on the planet, her most probably because some mad bloke is trying to break the world record for prolonged eye contact while his friend makes as if to spit on the floor of this exclusive Italian restaurant. Not entirely sure what the protocol is in such situations, I say goodbye to her as we leave. She stares again, this time with a slight squint.


A fleeting have-we-met? flicker accompanied by an inquisitive tilt of the head. Lost for something to say, I button my jacket and shuffle out. She smiles, then turns to sample a girlfriend's dessert. Outside the restaurant, my celebrity-despising friend finally spits on the floor. You really had to be there but we were killing ourselves. She looks out the window and starts cracking up hersel£ She gets the gag. Laughing at us laughing at her. She gives a tiny fingertip wave and for a second looks like the most beautiful person you've ever seen. And it was all down to those eyes.


I met Nicole Kidman on a few occasions recently in London. She was in town to fulfil some promotional duties and see friends; through one of those friends, we got to hang out for a while. Although she has been fantastically famous for a long time, London has, in a sense, made Nicole cool. The play, The Blue Room - in which she memorably disrobed - immediately revised the British opinion on the lanky antipodean actress.


"Theatrical Viagra!" cried the critics.


Before that keenly appreciated performance, Nicole was a regular visitor to London, even making it her home for over a year while she filmed Eyes Wide Shut with Stanley Kubrick and her then-husband Tom Cruise. Now this might be nauseatingly over familiar but I call her Nic. This is the name that the people around her use so you feel awkward reverting to the full title. It's almost as if Nicole Kidman is her stage name and Nic is who she actually is. Either way, after a few tentative stabs I get used to Nic and she seems more comfortable with the single-syllable option. So Nic it is.


A few random facts about Nic. She is fiercely intelligent, academically brilliant. At school she loved and excelled at physics and believed maths to be beguiling. She recently played the role of a Russian mail-order bride in Birthday Girl and instead of struggling with the accent, she learnt the language and is now almost fluent. She's learning to fly a helicopter too which, as anyone foolish enough to have attempted it will tell you, is like trying to drive a Ferrari while standing on a space hopper. Nic reckons it's fun.


One afternoon she mentions her place on the water in Sydney - "It's got, like, nine bedrooms or something" - and the inevitable question of speedboats arises: does she own one? She gazes into the middle distance for a while then says, "Yeah, I've got one on the big boat." Then she starts on about skydiving. And as Michael Parkinson will attest, you don't want that to happen. "I can't explain how exciting it is," she enthuses, the blue bits of her eyes now thrillingly drilling into your retina. "The high is beyond words. You free fall for about 50 seconds then the 'chute opens and you land like you would with any normal jump. I must have done it about 40 or 50 times now. I'm telling you. It has got to be the best thing I've ivver, ivverdone." Despite spending ten years in Hollywood, her accent is still defiantly Australian, her vowel sounds all over the shop. She frequently responds to a story with a quiet and breathy, "Wow" which comes out as "Whaya".


One weeknight when she's in London, Nic elects to go to the Monarch in Camden Town, a jewel of a micro-venue on the indie toilet circuit, to see a suitably unknown band. The sight of the luminous screen goddess leaning on the bar, ordering a lager and taking in a set by the Walkmen is priceless. The following evening, we're talking about music and she boldly claims to adore Radiohead's Kid A but crumbles when pressed to sing a tune from it. On safer ground she says that for her, Avalon Sunset is Van Morrison's best album.


A few more facts. She likes baked potatoes, big dogs and vintage clothes shops and is thinking about getting a tattoo of the Buddha on her ankle. Her feet are astonishingly elegant and she has a very high pain threshold. She's also something of a backgammon shark. A friend, who is pretty handy himself-won a number of competitions and so on - challenges her to a game and she takes two grand off him without breaking sweat. Unwilling to keep his money - she doesn't need it; she is, after all, said to be worth in the region of £150M and can name her asking price for a film - she offers to donate her winnings to charity. Oh, and she rarely wears knickers under her jeans and is delighted to learn the charming British expression for such an action. "Hey, I love that," she smirks. "I'm 'going commando'." One Saturday, we're watching Pop Idol on TV.


She's stretched out on a sofa. Occasionally I look over at her in repose and marvel at her physical beauty. She is tall, easily 5' 10", and very pale, almost Elizabethan in pallor. It would come as no surprise to learn that her skin is no colour at all, just a translucent sheen. Up close you can see her veins and if she is especially excited you can watch her blood pulse through them. In that respect, she is something of a biology teacher's dream.


"I think we had something like this in Australia," she frowns, recoiling from a close-up shot of Pete Waterman. "But the judges weren't so negative. I mean, what's the point of just dashing people's hopes?" She turns her body away from the television.


"I'm not sure about shows like this," she decides, lying on her side like a child at a sleep-over party.


"I'd rather watch a good movie any day." It is intriguing talking to Nic about films. She has, after all, lived and breathed them for all of her adult life.


She was married to the most powerful player in Hollywood for over a decade; she is, lest we forget, the best actress of her generation; and she has been more involved than anyone will ever know in some; of the biggest features of recent years. It's fair to say that she has forgotten more about movies than most people will ever know.


She believes she has seen "virtually every movie ever made" but hasn't seen Roman Holiday. She thought Ben Kingsley's role as the psychotic villain in Sexy Beast was "genius" and is quick to dismiss actors who take "flattering roles with no challenge, that's just... modelling." It comes to light that she thinks Dog Day Afternoon is Al Pacino's greatest movie. Not Scarface or The Godfather: Part II. Not even Serpico. Dog Day Afternoon. How cool is that?


It seems almost rude, but I've only seen a handful of the 26 films that Nic has made.


BMX Bandits (but we don't talk about that), Dead Calm (plain scary), To Die For (during which you rapidly realised that she is uniquely gifted), Eyes Wide Shut (admirable but unsexy) and more recently, The Others and Moulin Rouge!, for which she ought to have won an Oscar.


She is probably the only 34-year-old, Honolulu born, Sydney-raised, ginger, Catholic, skydiving multi-millionairess ever to have graced our screens.


Technically, she is untouchable. She has a stillness that draws you in and a facility for delivering lines as if she were genuinely living them. Watching her I prepare for a role is like watching a glider subtly shift course. There is no immediate, perceptible change but gradually Nic disappears from view leaving a shell, albeit an extremely attractive one, inhabited by the new fictitious persona.


Unlike many modern actors, there is very little of her own personality in the characters she plays. In the flesh, she has a curious portfolio of charming facial tics and tells - her nose twitches like a rabbit when she doesn't understand something - that you never see in her performances. She is, even in a physical sense, a very private woman. That said, she is aware that her most intimate actions have, for a long time, been made available for public consumption. She knows, whenever she walks into a room, that everyone within it will be more than familiar with virtually every detail of her personal life. Her ex, her kids, her homes, the custody battle, the divorce settlement, his girlfriends, her boyfriends, her fondness for f***-off frocks.


As any man with a beating heart knows, when she dresses down she looks gorgeous and when she dresses up it's just off the scale. The first time we meet formally she is wearing an antique T-shirt, old Levi's and perfectly weathered loafers. Our initial conversation is about perfume. She makes her own. "Here," she smiles, offering a slender wrist for a detailed olfactory inspection.


The smell is reminiscent of home-made custard and autumnal woodland, subliminally sweet and deceptively powerful. Although you're never fully aware of it, her scent can subtly fill a room.


It's a very Nic thing. She appeals to senses you barely knew existed. This ethereal quality informs everything she does. She glides and floats rather than walks; she gasps where others would use inappropriate words, she will occasionally examine your face so intently it is as if she is revisiting your past lives. In short, she was perfect for The Others.


Just for the hell of it, one morning in London, a group of us decide to try our collective hand at go-karting. Ten nervous souls pitch up at a racing circuit on the outskirts of town. As is always the case in such situations, Nic has a friend who is even better looking then she is. It's hard to imagine, isn't it? You are the highest profile female entertainer on earth and your sex-symbolism could barely be more sexy or symbolic and you happen to have a more attractive mate.


It may sound like crude racial stereotyping but Australians enjoy few activities more than throwing shrimps onto barbecues, filling their billycans and reminiscing about their criminal forefathers. They also love to have a laugh. The go-karting, although seriously competitive and unhygienically hot, is a hoot from gun to tape. The adrenaline really starts flowing when you overhear the girls earnestly discussing the moral ramifications of wearing hired overalls when you are, as Nic now authoritatively has it, "going commando." The west London kart track may be pleased to learn that they are now in possession of possibly the most valuable fire-retardant trousers ever to come on to the market.


It is a registered fact that nobody looks good in padded motor racing duds. Nobody, that is, apart from Nic and her fragrant friend who today have elected to wear theirs rolled down and tied by the arms around their slender waists. They resemble nothing so much as fantasy mechanics in the most threadbare porn movie plot of all time. May the image, though appallingly clichéd, never desert me.


Out in the lobby Nic examines a prototype kart. She studies the ground-grazing height of the chassis and the terrifying proximity of the white-hot motor to the driver's right arm. She scrutinises the flimsy pedals, the Lego-like wheels and the tiny, tiny seat. "I'm never going to get my arse into that," she scowls. Women the free world over will be reassured that even Nicole Kidman, the girl known as Stalky at school on account of her fishing-rod physique, worries about her bum looking big in certain lightweight vehicles.


She then learns that these little lawn mowers can do 40MPH on a good day and will only flip if you try very hard. Nic speaks for us all when she takes a draft of fume rich air and mutters, "Oh my god." Of course she turns out to be a regular, small-track Schumacher, hurtling into hairpins and scoffing at hazardous chicanes. After a long and greasy drive, Nic comes fourth in the group. We order chips and ... Coca-Cola although Nic is reluctant to indulge in either temptation. :'If I even started on those I'd never be able to get into another go-kart again," she grins, wiping her damp forehead on the sleeve of her small T-shirt.


By way of contrast, that evening she dresses up to go to a Mayfair casino to play blackjack. It goes without saying that Nic looks radiant. The womenfolk present debate the provenance of her gossamer dress, only to conclude that it was obviously hand-made by some unpronounceable ponce and cost a million quid. They generously admit it was worth every penny. The word "breathtaking" has become sorely debased but I swear I saw grown men reach for their inhalers.


Conversation stops as she sashays through the rooms, making her way to the tables. Perching on a stool, she crosses her implausibly long legs. "Right," she beams with a savage smile, stroking the blackjack baize. "Let's lose all our money." The way in which she handles cash is fascinating to observe. She delves into her clutch bag, a small antique affair, and pulls out a sheaf of fifties that she neither stacks nor tidies nor indeed looks at.


Then she simply directs what must be at least £1,500 towards the croupier and without checking or touching the chips he gives her, continues to play. She is great to gamble with. "Ooh," she says as the house wins once again. "You are sooo cruel," she laughs, absently shunting another bundle of bills in the dealer's general direction.


Later, a marvellous moment occurs. Nic has brought Birthday Girl director Jez Butterworth along to the casino and he is having a nightmare. No matter what he does, he takes a hiding every hand. ("Does his bollocks," as Guy Ritchie would probably say.) He's a smart fellow but the cards aren't going his way. After an hour or so everyone else is more or less breaking even apart from Jez, who is about £700 down. In fact, he is so far down, he has just two £10 chips left, one of which he is now betting on a hopeless hand of 15. He loses.


"Look," says Nic firmly, "have some of my chips. I'm doing pretty well here. Take some, just until we finish." He won't take her up on the offer, he's got his pride. Instead, he takes his last chip over to the roulette table and slaps it down on red 32. We gather around the wheel, hearts pumping, hopes declining. Nic is next to me, her eyes flickering as if aflame. Beneath her sheer dress I can see her porcelain bosom rise and fall as the ball clatters tantalisingly around the wheel in search of its final resting place. It lands on 32. "God," says Nic. "That is amazing." Jez scoops up his chips and heads off into the night. "Why does stuff like that always happen?" wonders Nic as she collects her winnings.


"Life is very weird sometimes, isn't it?" Very weird. It dawns on me, the morning before Nic leaves London, that her sojourn has been strikingly similar to Audrey Hepburn's in Roman Holiday, the one movie Nic has never seen. She came into town as the visiting princess, then got waylaid by a bunch of commoners. She hung out, drank tea, went to see challenging bands in Camden pubs, talked rubbish, gambled, laughed, cried and did all the stuff you'd do in any given London week. But now she's going home, back to LA and I, for one, don't want her to go. But how to say it? Should one be Gregory Peck-noble or, like some spineless product of our times, just blurt out how you're feeling? Finally, I figure it out. "Nic," I say. "Don't go." A forlorn flash of those indescribable eyes, a final flutter of fingers and she is gone, leaving a roomful of regrets and just the gentlest suggestion of vanilla and musk. A perfect exit. Audrey would be so proud.

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