Nicole Kidman is as famous for what she wears as for who is (or isn’t) on her arm. Daisy Garnett chats with the star of The Others and The Hours about Virginia Woolf, mother-daughter dressing, and having a style of one’s own.


Nicole Kidman knows that I am here, deep in the English countryside on a rare sunny day, to interview her about her style. Kidman has a great gift when it comes to dressing. On-screen and off, she uses clothes to display, rather than define, herself, with startling effectiveness. There she is on the red carpet in Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche at the Cannes Film Festival in May doing just that. Or at the New York premiere of Moulin Rouge in a white beaded vintage Loris Azzaro gown, satin choker, and jeweled cuffs. Or at the Oscars in 2000, wearing a toga-inspired Dior dress in spun gold. She never looks inappropriate, never looks uncomfortable, and rarely gets it wrong. In fact, she looks like she grew up wearing couture and white gloves, with perfect politesse, learning les petits soins from someone strict, Parisian, and chic. But, as the world knows, she hails from Australia and lives in Hollywood.


I am visiting Kidman on the set of The Hours, Stephen Daldry’s upcoming movie based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham. The book, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, is about one day in the life of three women -- a contemporary New York book editor, a 1949 Housewife in California, and Virginia Woolf, in 1923, when she lived in Richmond, outside London. It is a novel full of epiphanies, one that many people (women in particular) find important and powerful, and the film -- which also stars Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore -- promises to be a big, juicy one.


“You probably won’t recognize Nicole,” a publicist tells me as she sits me down next to a craft-service table, which has on it a few tea bags, some powdered milk, and a few nasty looking apples, to wait for the star. “You might be in for a surprise,” the woman says, smiling. Right, I think. As in, of course I’ll recognize her. I know she is playing Virginia Woolf in 1923: I don’t expect to see her with her bells on, all red hair and flashing eyes, sashaying through the wildflowers of Hertfordshire.


A woman comes up to me and smiles. She has salt-and-pepper hair, and her long, narrow nose is slightly hooked. It is a hot day and she is dressed in a huge (and ugly) red down coat and sneakers. I smile back, vaguely. I realize, suddenly, that it is, of course, Nicole Kidman. “Well,” she says, leading me to her small and indistinct trailer, “I’m looking very stylish today.” (She isn’t.) “I’ve got my trainers on,” she says, sitting down and taking off the absurd coat, “and I was wearing this in between shots, because it was freezing inside the house. And these silk stockings, and these garters” - she raises her blue-and-white embroidered 1920s cotton shift with glee - “the men on the set call these passion killers.” She laughs. Her leg is very skinny and very white. The stocking, indeed held up by a garter just below the knee, is baggy and sagging. (Imagine Dame Edna Everage on a bad day.) “I thought garters and stockings were sexy,” Kidman says, “but the guys said not those, and not the way you look. So I’m a passion killer at the moment. Although I don’t agree, because I think my trainers and stockings are great.”


“I was stunned and daunted when I realized I was being asked to play Virginia Woolf,” says Kidman. “But then I felt excited, because it is such a stretch. When something comes out of the blue like this and you think, I can do this? How the hell? That’s when you say, ‘Ooh, this is it.’ Of course I don’t ask Stephen Daldry how he thought I could do it, or why. He might have said, ‘Actually you’re right. Forget it. Offer withdrawn.’ Instead, I said, ‘I’d really love to do it, and don’t worry, I can.’” And so she has. Tomorrow she is due to shoot Woolf’s suicide scene. Today she is relaxed, talking while she eats her lunch, which is a plate of food I cannot identify. It is a bit of old tuna steak, she tells me. Ah, I can see it has been cooked, the old-fashioned way, by someone English. Kidman tucks in, not noticing, I sit opposite her and stare at her false nose. Amazingly, it looks at home on her face, which, with her pale skin and modest mouth, now appears uncannily Edwardian.


“My nose?” says Kidman, when I ask her about it (she spends four hours in the makeup chair in order to become plain). “I’m usually comfortable with it. It’s right for me and for the character - part of finding and helping to convey the essence of Virginia, but it’s not a big issue? I keep forgetting about it.” Not a big issue? It’s her nose. Her gray hair, by the way, is worn in a center part and very flat. “Oh, it’s all going to come off,” Kidman says when I ask her what it is like to act without her hair, always such an immediate indicator of sexuality, “Right now I’ve just shoved it up under my gray. I must be the only actress actually asking for gray,” she says with a laugh. “But after this movie it’s getting the chop. Gone.”


A lot, it seems, is coming off Nicole Kidman these days - most notably, of course, that big-top title, Mrs. Tom Cruise. I ask her if she feels any professional relief in returning to Nicole Kidman - single, working actress. “But there is even more media interest in me now,” she says, sighing. “It’s a strange time,” she continues, displaying her ability to pull off openness without revealing anything very intimate, part of the consummate professionalism fro which she is known. And it is strange: A marital is not unusual, but how many 34-year-old women have to talk to strangers about it while wearing a fake nose? Still, if she is adept at supplying noncommittal answers to difficult questions, she does not bother getting defensive. “You know, I keep saying that my life will change. It will become far more settled and real over the next few years,” she beings again. “You have this strange relationship with it. You try to keep it at bay.” There is a silence while the words hang in the air. “I’ve tried,” she says, beginning to laugh, “and failed.”


Still, there are perks: the chartreuse Asian-inspired, floor-length Christian Dior gown trimmed with mink that Kidman wore to the 1997 Oscars, for one. “That was the first time I wore couture,” she remembers. “I went to Paris to see John Galliano’s first collection for Dior. It’s become a legendary collection, but even at the time - it was when I was filming Eyes Wide Shut - I remember seeing the clothes and thing, This kind of elegance and perfection does not happen. I knew I’d always remember it.” As well she might. Nicole Kidman wearing that dress on the red carpet, with crimson lipstick and her hair tied back, and Cruise on her arm in a tuxedo, has become part of Dior’s modern iconography. And yet, when I ask her why she chose that dress over the many she tried and how she felt wearing it, she seems to lose interest in our conversation. “It was a spontaneous choice,” she says.


Kidman’s choices may be spontaneous, but they are not accidental. “Fashion is incredibly relevant,” she offers, explaining her enthusiasm. “It pushes boundaries, and it trains the eye to appreciate a new or different aesthetic. That is important. That is worth embracing.” And embrace fashion she does, not merely in the abstract. Kidman is an avid vintage-dress collector, and while she keeps accessories to a minimum, she does buy antique jewelry. When I ask her to name her two favorite dresses, she says, “I don’t know. I’d take any two,” but she is always fastidiously put together and has a keen eye. She liked the clothes she tried on for this shoot - the YSL peasant dress, a ‘60s inspired Miu Miu mini, and a Galliano bias-cut gown - so much that she ended up taking some of them )and ordering more) for her trip to Cannes, where she was busy promoting Moulin Rouge. (And she says she hasn’t been shopping for a year. Well, no. She just had her people explain the situation to their people and it all worked out in the end.)


“If something is beautiful, I don’t mind wearing it whether someone else has been photographed in it or not,” she says about the problem of wearing clothes that become a part of the zeitgeist. “I loved wearing Tom Ford in Cannes,” Besides, as well as having good instincts, Kidman, one of two sisters, gained a fashion education while she was growing up in Sydney. Kidman’s mother, a nursing instructor and social activist (her father is a biochemist and clinical psychologist) with whom she is close, introduced both her daughters to vintage shopping by taking them to flea markets. “I always looked for ‘50s pieces,” remembers Kidman. “I had this white tulle skirt that I used to wear with fishnets and little black ankle boots to this tranny club called the Stranded. It was a Thompson Twins look, very ‘80s. And now I’m back wearing ‘80s stuff again.” Such as? “Balenciaga,” she says, and then sounding like the teenager with a tulle skirt, she whispers, “Nicolas [Ghesquière] just sent me his latest bag, which I love.” I ask her to describe it. “It’s black,” she says vaguely, “with things on it.”


Luckily, Nicole Kidman can wear a frock better than she can talk a frock. But then Nicolas Ghesquière is not sending the actress the bag of the season (there is no waiting list for Nicole) fro her just to yak about it. “Nicole is easy to make beautiful because of her electric personality and her love of life,” says John Galliano. “She is a dream.” And indeed, with that famously long and narrow body, she must be wonderful to dress. “Believe me,” she counters, about her physique, “it’s okay. I get by, but it’s not great. I have a boy body, and I would rather look like a girl. Moulin Rouge was all about the corsets and the padding.” In real life, however, doesn’t disappear into an outfit or any fantasy it might offer. Her daily uniform as a working mother, for example, is simple (Capri pants and a T-****) and mostly black. “When you are 16 or 17,” she explains, “it’s terribly important to have something to go out in on Saturday night, but more and more these days, especially with all the traveling I’m doing, I’m into having less.”


Kidman, like many a good Australian, is a prodigious traveler. “I get antsy if I’m in one place for too long,” she has said, and certainly, over the past couple of years, she’s been on the move. After finishing Moulin Rouge in Australia, she raced to Madrid (taking with her one cracked rib, two children, and a damaged knee) to film Alejandro Amenábar’s new movie The Others. After The Hours wraps, Kidman tells me, she will spend a few days in London catching up on the theater. Then she hopes to visit her family in Sydney and then return to the States. She knows that the future, in terms of work projects, means a movie with Lars von Trier and more stage work - she wants to do Ibsen’s The Lady From the Sea with director Trevor Nunn at London’s National Theatre, but she is not talking about anything else. “The future is out there, and I’m not sure what is happening in it past the next month and a half,” is all she’ll say.


Meanwhile, the mechanics of her career will keep her busy. When she returns to America she will promote The Others, a film written, directed, and scored by Amen bar (whose film Open Your Eyes was recently remade as Vanilla Sky by Cameron Crowe and Tome Cruise). The Others is a psychological thriller about a young mother marooned inside a haunted house in the Channel Islands just as the Second War is coming to an end. “I read the script and thought how unusual it was. I’d never seen a movie like it,” says Kidman. “The role was so complex - a woman suffering from the loss of her husband, coping with her children, and trying to keep it all together.” There is a pause. Kidman, could, in another conversation, be describing her own situation. “The film is like a Greek tragedy,” she says firmly, knocking that comparison on its head.


“I cast her because of her eyes,” says Amenábar about his leading lady. “she transmits her cleverness and her complexity through them. Of course I knew how fantastic she was as an actress from watching her other work, but what I discovered directing her was something Tom Cruise had told me about her. He said that she can give you a different variation - subtle yet different layers of character - not just with each scene, but with every take. And it’s true. It’s a wonderful gift for a director, because it means you have many choices when you come to edit the film. It allows you to play with the line of the character.”


What Amenábar says is not surprising if you think of the way Kidman dresses. When she is all dressed up (and you rarely see a photograph of her when she’s not), she is properly old-school glamorous, every inch a movie star. But she looks at ease in her trainers. Even the nose suits her. Her conversation is incomparable: One moment she sits cross-legged on the floor, bellowing with laughter with costume designer Ann Roth; the next she is still, thoughtful about her craft. Much of the time she is plain-talking and straight-forward. “My daughter has strong opinions about what I wear,” Kidman says, sounding like any other mother. “She doesn’t like too much skin,” she goes on, her Australian accent becoming broader with maternal pleasure. “It embarrasses her. I remember being embarrassed by my mother, but it’s mortifying knowing that she is going to have that strength of emotion about me. How dreadful,” she says perfectly happily. Though she is careful to retain their privacy, Kidman seems at her most relaxed when she is talking about her children, Isabella, eight, and Connor, six. “She’s already in my closet,” says Kidman of her daughter. “She’s dangerous. She has such a strong will about how she wants to look and what she thinks is cool.” She is her mother’s daughter.


If Kidman is a woman who knows how she wants to look, enjoying clothes as costume, she is not, paradoxically, an actress who uses costume to discover character. She and Ann Roth, who won an Oscar in 1997 for her work on The English Patient. “I remember when I was doing The Blue Room,” Kidman says, “Iain Glen was using props and outfits to help him find the different characters in the play, the way they walked and talked. But I purposefully used nothing like that. I stayed in jeans and a T-shirt the whole way through. I wanted to find each person’s emotion from within,” she says. “I don’t how to do it. It just comes.”


“It is hard to have confidence,” adds Kidman, “and it’s not something I’ve got in spades, at all.… But I think that it’s probably not so good as an actor to become too attached to yourself and your identity within the world. It’s good as a human being, though.” She begins to get up. She is, today, an actress. She is being called by makeup for a touch-up. As she walks away from the trailer, I see her standing up in full costume fro the first time. She looks very thin and rather frail, but she walks with a deliberate step, toward her set, where she is Virginia Woolf - complicated, troubled, difficult, revered. Somewhere in there is Nicole Kidman, human being. But in an instant she has pushed that person to the back of the closet. “That’s the reason she’s a movie star,” says Roth, also watching her transformation. “It’s because she is a brave actress and a brave woman.”



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