Nicole Kidman makes a certain noise. It’s hard to describe. its not a sharp intake of breath, its more elongated than that. its airy and growly at the same time. Imagine the sound you'd make if someone gave you the exact present you'd wanted your whole life, crossed with the sound Homer Simpson makes when he sees a doughnut. It has elements of eagerness and empathy, with an undertone of sex. Kidman loves to talk; she does so quickly, decisively. When she really gets going on something, she makes this sound.


Nicole Kidman smells like powdered flowers. She walks into the deserted dining room at the Chateau Marmont hotel in L.A. wearing a gauzy white dress with lavender embroidery, delicate, expensive, jewellery; and flat sandals studded with dozens of real turquoise stones. she orders a pot of black coffee and drinks it hot. Her hair is yellow blond and wildly wavy, even though it's pulled into a tight topknot. Corkscrew coils spring free from the knot from time to time , and when she's agitated she plays with them, stroking the ends between the thumbs and forefingers of each hand in rapid turns. She has a perfect , even hairline. Her arms and legs are fantastically long and thin, her skin pale and almost translucent. Takeaway her dress and hair, and she would look exactly like the spaghetti-limbed, regal aliens who waft down the ramp of their mother ship in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.


Nicole Kidman has a number of close friends, many of whom became attached to her instantly and intensely. "We just clicked" she often says. They talk about her with hyperbolic affection, always using the same words: elegant, intelligent, quick to laugh, strong. "Nicole has great sexual wit about her," says David Hare, who wrote the play The Blue Room, in which Kidman starred in both London and New York. "You get the feeling that being in love with her would be a lot of fun."





"Being around Nicole is like being around electricity, "says Baz Luhrmann, who directed Kidman to an Oscar nomination in Moulin Rouge. "She is a febrile life force. When you're with her, you will have an exciting time. But she's best to be around when things are at their worst. When you're in trouble she's like ‘Okay, let's go.’" Luhrmann lost his father as he was beginning Moulin Rouge, then watched his leading lady endure a very public split from her husband of ten years, Tom Cruise, and break two ribs and smash her knee - and never stop working. "I was so thankful for her energy," he says.


Russell Crowe, who befriended Kidman when they were both fledgling actors in Australia, sent me a faxed statement that is a torrent of praise: "Nicole is nurturing by instinct, loyal beyond question, wise beyond her years. Her friendship is a constant gift of joy. Since I’ve known her I've always put her on a pedestal, not because she is untouchable, simply because she deserves my respect, for the bravery she applies to her work and the thoroughness with which she attends to life." Crowe goes on from there, for quite a while and even actually calls Kidman "fierce" It's a word many of her friends use when they're describing her passion or determination and its a good word for her. After 2 hours with Kidman, you see that she’s made of many dramatic parts: her well-expressed enthusiasms, her hungry rosebud mouth, the blood that pulses visibly through her blue veins near her collarbone, her phalanx of friends, her thoroughness of attention, her fierceness. But the part that best defines her is the gaspy sound she makes, that wholesale inhalation of life.


Talk to any Hollywood player about Kidman , who turned 35 in June and he will tell you that this is her time. Her last three films, Moulin Rouge, The Others and Birthday Girl, earned raves for her range. "She is a woman in her prime," Luhrmann says: all of her strengths are on show. In terms of talent and attractiveness, she’s the best she’s ever been."


To prove it, she’s got four movies on the way. She spent the 2002 awards season which earned her dual golden globe nominations for the others and moulin rouge (she won for the latter), jetting between L.A. and Trollhattan Sweden, where for six weeks she shot the loopy experiment Dogville, directed by Dogma 95 cofounder Lars con Trier (Dancer in the Dark). In May, she filmed the Human Stain adapted from the Philip Roth novel and co-starring Anthony Hopkins due in early 2003. In August she headed to Romania with Jude Law and Renee Zellweger for the romantic drama Cold Mountain Based on the prize winning novel by Charles Frazier and directed by Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr Ripley).


And next month, she stars as Virginia Woolf in The Hours, an elegiac account of one day in the lives of three women linked by Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep play the other two characters, a housewife in 1950's L.A. and a lesbian in contemporary New York, respectively despite their surface differences each woman is living the same too-small life and struggling to beat back the same emotional demons. It’s based on yet another prize-winning best-seller, this time by Michael Cunningham a novel that many thought was too literary to translate to the screen.


"Nicole is using her power for good in the industry, the way Meryl Streep did," says Hare, who wrote the Hours' screenplay. "An actress has power for only a limited number of years, and the good ones use their stardom to get worthwhile scripts made. Those of us who want to be involved in worthwhile films notice it's the actresses who do it; they cant afford to waste their brief time making dumb movies." "Nicole is dangerous," says Hours director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot), who shot Kidman's third of the film last, in rural England. "She’s like a fantastic racehorse; there's something unpredictable and dangerous there. She was the most interesting possible casting choice we could make: Let’s not have a dowdy, literary Woolf; lets have a fearless, sexy one.


Kidman underwent a total transformation, complete with new nose (a hawkish prosthetic, which givers her face a gravitas that her tiny, upturned nose does not) wardrobe (baggy housedresses, messy hair), and voice (a deep husky English accent). She delivers her lines with a mocking, mischievous wit. Test audiences didn’t recognize her. Oscar buzz is audible already.


Because Woolf rolled her own Cigarettes, Kidman did, too; she also copied Woolfs handwriting, which meant that the lefty had to learn to use her right hand. She read all of Woolf’s books and most of her letters, and spent the three-week shoot living alone in a rented cottage in the woods reading writing dreaming, "just thinks that Virginia would do, " Kidman says. "Which sounds ridiculous, but for me was very important. When your embodying a person who has lived, you want to be true to their essence, not imitate or mimic." Her main touchstones were the hankie in her pocket and a used pair of brown lace-up shoes. "I put them on and went, yeah. The gave me how I stood on the earth," Kidman says


"Nicole doesn’t stick her toe in to a role, she dives in," says Sydney Pollack, who co-starred with Kidman and Cruise in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut and has been a friend to both since he directed cruise in the firm. "When she plays an unflattering character, like in Birthday Girl or To Die For, she doesn't protect herself the way a lot of actors will. She doesn’t win at the audience or try to redeem herself unconsciously. That takes a lot of guts. I think in the beginning Hollywood was put off by her coolness. They like their hearts to bleed for a character."


"What is most remarkable about Nicole is, she loves the task," Hare says. "I've never met anyone as keen on accomplishing some practical feat. When we started The Blue Room, she knew nothing about stage acting, and by the time we opened she was brilliant. I’ve never seen anybody learn theatre acting that fast. She sets herself to do whatever needs to be done with tremendous application. I dread that someone will hire her to play an Arctic explorer, and then we'll lose her in the arctic forever."


One must also notice, however, that the stratospheric rise in Kidman’s career over the past two years coincided with the crash of her decade-long marriage to Cruise. They had made three movies together, adopted two children (Isabella, nine, and Connor, seven), and reigned as Hollywood’s most glittering and gossiped-about couple. "Back when we worked together, Nicole felt the Hollywood establishment didn’t like her," says Gus Van Sant, who directed To die For, Kidman’s first standout performance. She won a Golden Globe award but mystifyingly didn’t get an Oscar nomination. "She’d say, ‘Oh, they hate me!’" Van Sant says.


"It could have been envy," Pollack agrees. "As a couple Cruise and Kidman seemed to have everything - riches, talent, extraordinary beauty. It’s hard for people to look at that and not feel resentment."


After the split, however, public affection shifted toward Kidman. "I would hope this success would have happened had I stayed married," she says, her voice slowing from its usual breakneck pace. "I would hate to think you have to go through something like that to..." She trails off.


I ask whether, like many women who share a profession with their husbands, she had paid more attention to his career than her own. "Probably, yeah," she says, nodding. "He’s the biggest movie star in the world, so of course. But it was my choice. I didn’t resent it. I don’t think I ever would have resented it. The most important thing to me was my marriage. And wanting a child. From the minute I got married, when I was 23, I wanted a baby, and didn’t care about some stupid movie. We adopted Bella when I was 25. That was my focus."


Only now, two years after the split is Kidman beginning to think of herself as divorced. "Because it’s a failure," she says unblinking. "If you ask what I would have loved for my life, it’s not this. I would have loved to emulate my parents, for my marriage to have been successful, to have raised my children within that cocoon. But now I’m a divorced woman..." here her voice nearly breaks, but doesn’t - "along with millions of other divorced women. Grappling with all that that entails."


She sighs gustily. "I think that with divorce I really grew up. Other things happened at the same time, too: I lost a baby, I had health problems. An enormous amount happened to me, which I’ve never gone into and probably never will, because it’s mine. But it was hell. Dark - it was dark. And deeply lonely. I felt panic and absolute fear about my future. I thought I knew what my future would be, then suddenly I didn’t. So then I went, ‘What’s it all about? What is life? Why do you want to live it? What is hope?’ I had all these nihilistic thoughts.


"But once I started to face them with that comes, ‘Okay now I know,’" she continues. "Prior to that, I was walking around with rose-coloured glasses. I always knew in the back of my head that everybody has to deal with something bad in this life. To deal with it all in the space of a couple of months, though, was like, ‘Ugh, this is too much, how am I ever, ever, ever going to live through this?’ But then I did, and that’s when I went, ‘I think I’ve grown up now.’"


Friends moved in, literally from all corners of the globe - among them Crowe, Naomi Watts (the Mulholland Drive star who’s been Kidman’s best pal for 20 years), Kidman’s sister Antonia (a married Australian TV producer who arrived with her two children), and her mom (who’d experienced a similar influx of friends while fighting breast cancer years ago). They slept on Kidman’s couch and "helped me just get out of bed in the morning," she sways. "These people were astounding in their love. But as much as friends and family are in my life, and were there for me as much as they could be, I realized I am ultimately alone. There are times when nobody’s there to hold your hand. Nobody. You go to bed at night by yourself and you say, ‘Okay, ten hours of darkness until the sun comes up.’ I now have an enormous amount of awareness and compassion for how much people have to struggle with that.


Hovey Manor is a serene, white-clapboard, green-shuttered inn overlooking Lake Massawippi in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, a vacation region some 90 minutes east of Montreal. On a sunny, buggy May afternoon, it’s posing as a New England restaurant for a scene in The Human Stain. Kidman plays Faunia Farley, a cleaning lady with an abusive past who has a doomed love affair with a classics professor named Coleman Silk (Hopkins). She wears jeans, a zippered, hooded sweater, and ordinary-girl hair, dyed dull blond.


In this scene, Coleman brings Faunia to a fancy restaurant, where she’s visibly uncomfortable. Without warning her, he’s also invited his friend Nathan Zuckerman (Gary Sinise). Mortified at being set up, Faunia storms out. They have a bitter fight in Coleman’s car, which ends with a desperate kiss.


On-camera, Kidman plays around with her dialogue, liberally throwing in f**ks and sh*ts and self depreciating insults. Between takes, she seems as nervous as Faunia. Shoulders tense, she mutters to herself angrily and smokes incessantly, holding the butts of her Marlboros against her lips as if they contained rage itself. When everyone moves outside to shoot the scene in the car, she exhales a moan so loud several extras near her jump.


After a few takes, director Robert Benton (who worked with Kidman on Billy Bathgate) tells her gently, "The look on your face is a look of pleading, and it’s very good." On the next take, Kidman starts crying and can’t stop, as cameramen fiddle around her. "Can we go again right away?" Hopkins asks quietly. "Nicole is emotional." Without looking at her he rubs her neck soothingly with one hand. After Hopkins’s final close-up around 3.am, he hugs Kidman tightly for a long time. His stand-in, an old friend, feigns crying. "The lucky b*****d" he says.


"I don’t think Nicole knows how good she is," Hopkins says later. "The other night we did a scene where she was sitting on my bed in a T-shirt and panties, smoking, one leg up on the bed. And it was so powerful, because I could see this woman’s whole background - she could drive trucks, drink beer, get laid, and was deeply lonely and battered and scarred and tough. Just the way she was smoking that cigarette, you could see the whole story of her life. It was so easy to play scenes with her, dead easy."


When I ask Kidman that night if she always stays in character between takes, she seems surprised. "Was I staying in character?" she asks. But a month later, back in L.S., she agrees that she was. "I can see that when I step out of it. I was totally in a weird state." She laughs. "I don’t have to be called by that name or anything, but I take on the personality."


Her first task is to find a character’s voice. In person Kidman’s accent is flat-out Aussie gull; fear becomes fee-ah, ever is ehv-ah. In preparing for a role, Kidman and her long time dialect coach, Elizabeth Hammelstein, work two hours a day, five days a week, for two weeks to erase that. To play an upper-class New Yorker in Eyes Wide Shut, Kidman read Ovid and Emily Dickinson aloud. For Birthday Girl, she watched videotapes of real Russian mail-order brides and copied the way they used their mouths. "Every day Nicole would listen to a tape of a woman named Anna, who told me her whole life story," Himelstein says. "By the end, she would mouth the words; she has memorized Anna."


To play Faunia, Kidman met with Philip Roth, who talked with her for hours about the way Fuania walked and directed her to visit some women’s shelters and to meet victims of abuse. "I promised them I would give Faunia dignity," Kidman says. "I asked, ‘If there was something you wanted the world to know about women who are abused, what would it be?’ They said, ‘That we’re not dumb.’ Because everybody thinks they bring it on themselves. That really touched me."


As famous as she is for her hard work - for the drowning scene in The Hours, for example, she insisted on going into a fast-moving, frigid river so many times that director Daldry worried, "’I am going to drown Nicole Kidman.’ But she had no fear"- Kidman is also known for collapsing with exhaustion when a film wraps. "Tony Hopkins, who really manages to turn it on and turn it off, taught me a lot about that," she says. "I don’t do that. My character smokes? I’ll smoke three packets a day. They said, ‘You want herbals?’ I said, ‘No, give me the Marlboros.’"


So what advice did Hopkins offer? "None, really. I just watched the way he did it," Kidman says, then grins widely. "Ooh, I love Tony. I love him! I look at those eyes, that face, harughh, I’d walk a thousand miles for him. And I loooooooved to kiss him."


Kidman is aware of the irony that ending her marriage also benefited her, "opened me up." In her words, both professionally and personally. "Five years ago, would anyone have cast Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf?" Hare asks. "Probably not."


"In terms of me now being a fuller individual, I feel that," Kidman says. "I would never have been able to disappear in Sweden and do the von Trier movie for example. I couldn’t’ devote myself to something to something that fully. Which now I can."


Set in the 1930s, Dogville is about a mysterious woman who comes to a small town. It was shot on digital video in continuous takes that could last as long as 90 minutes. There were no sets, just chalk marks on a platform. "It’s very, very weird," Kidman says. "Lars has interesting, sometimes bizarre, but very strong ideas about things, and makes films that have those ideas in them. I work well with directors who have strong ideas. I saw nothing, not one frame of footage, purposefully. I don’t even know what I look like on-camera in it." She takes a swig of coffee. "When Lars went to pre-sell the movie and showed a test, people thought it was a joke, that he was trying to be funny. He wasn’t." Her ice-blue eyes open wide. "Hey, it’s an experiment. I did it for nothing. Literally nothing. I wanted to disappear into something, and I did."


"Trollhattan is the dullest place on earch," says paul Bettany, Kidman’s costar in Dogville (he played Crowe’s imaginary roommate in A Beautiful Mind). "The entire town exists to serve the local Saab factory. But somehow Nicole managed to make it a ball."


She arranged for oysters and Cristal champagne to be delivered to the set. She made Bettany go hiking with her in the mountains -"If you knew me, you would know how unlikely that was," he says - and to jolly him along she told him horror stories until they both got so spooked that they ended up running three miles back to their car. "We were scared witless," Bettany says. "It’s one of her favourite things to do apparently."


On the day Bettany and Kidman met, von Trier introduced them, then left the room so they could talk. Suddenly Kidman whispered, "Look." Von Trier was hanging on the fire escape out their window, listening furiously. "I haven’t the smallest idea why," Bettany said. "Because he’s touched. But Nicole just went, ‘Hello,’ and invited him in, and we all acted like nothing happened. For Nicole Kidman to decide to make this kind of film - to work for a director who is completely mad, who gets frustrated if you’ve learned your dialogue properly - that is an impressive level of commitment. She refuses to be Nicole Kidman, Inc."


I ask Kidman about her ability to continue working during her divorce. "People think I worked and worked, but no. My last three movies were made long before 2001. Last year I only did The Hours, and that was only three weeks’ work. I pulled out of two films." (These were Panic Room, after a knew injury, and In the Cut, an erotic thriller she’d developed for five years with director Jane Campion. Meg Ryan now has the role, with Kidman producing.) "This year I did six weeks on Dogville and six on The Human Stain. Ada in Cold Mountain will be my first leading role since the divorce." To prepare, she’s currently boning up on the Civil War and learning to play Chopin on the piano.


"I think roles come in threes," Kidman says. "Virginia, Faunia, and now Ada make a cycle. Virginia came along at a time when I really needed her. It was the most difficult time of my life, and I was playing a woman - one of the great minds of the world - in the most difficult time of her life. To enter into her thought processes at that time was wonderful for me, educational and freeing. She was in pain, yet she worked with it. She delved into everything, and didn’t take things lightly. I love that in people. Being willing to face things, rather than shutting down or running away from them."


The afternoon we have this conversation happens to be the day Minority Report opens, and Cruise’s face is everywhere, including four magazine covers in the lobby of the Marmount itself. 'Shall we hide these?' a concierge had asked when I told him I’d be interviewing Kidman.


"That’s a part of my life, it isn’t going to change," she sways. "We’re parents, we’re in each other’s lives for the rest of our lives. Yeah, sometimes it’s difficult, seeing everything that he’s doing in a magazine. I still feel things. Of course. I’m not still in love with him, though,. There’s been an enormous amount of ware under the bridge. But he knows I’ll be there for him for the rest of his life, no matter what happens. You can either come out of divorce extremely angry and bitter, or you can say, ‘I’m going to be the best person I can be under these circumstances.’ I much prefer to choose the latter."


"Tom has a much stronger protective shield around him than I do," she continues. "I’m much more open to emotion. I’ve been in a more fragile, vulnerable state, while he can move on. With an enormous amount of force and willpower."


Does she ever wish he hadn’t moved on with quite so much force? "Of course," she breaths, then laughs. "Of course. But listen, my kids have seen me alone for two years now, and I really wanted that. I’m not sharing my life with anybody at the moment, because I wanted them to have me. But now I’m beginning to say, ‘I’m moving gently forward.’ The future is still uncertain, but I feel less fearful. I had over a decade in a committed, beautiful, powerful relationship. I would certainly love to have a life partner again. It’s just not the time now."


In the past, Kidman has been called cold onscreen. It wasn’t her talent - it was her aura. "She has a perfect face, and sometimes it’s hard to get past that," Luhrmann says. "But now her inner personality is coming out. She’s gone from being part of a partnership to being a person who has found herself. She’s revealing and releasing herself into her work like never before. She could have chosen to work that face for a long time in commercial fare. But that isn’t how she wants to work, or live. Remember the scene in Moulin Rouge where she has to run to the top of this 60 foot elephant? I made her wear a thin safety wire, and she hated it. I have this image of her pulling at it, saying, ‘I can’t do it properly with this thing on’ That image defines her; She cannot bear restraint."


Kidman’s crises, and the way she’s handled them, have made her seem less goddess like, more human. Imperfection looks good on her. "I think she’s much more attractive with the prosthetic nose," Hare says. "The first time I saw her on the set of The Hours, I said, ‘Who is that incredibly interesting-looking woman?"


"To play Ada at the end of all this is so lovely, because it’s about hope, it’s about belief, it’s about people coming out for each other in times of crisis," Kidman says. "There is cruelty in human nature, but I’ve seen the evidence of great kindness as well."


She takes a last sip of coffee. "I still am so trusting," she says. "So trusting. My mother says, ‘Don’t be so ridiculously trusting, Nicole.’" She sets her cup onto its saucer with a click. "But I’m not going to give that up. I don’t’ want to. So, I get burned a few times. But I get to feel..." She made her sound. "I get to feel everything."
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