Welcome to Nicole's Magic, a fansite for the spectacular spectacular Academy Award winning Australian actress Nicole Kidman. Nicole is one of the most sought-after actresses of her generation, and is known for her roles in Moulin Rouge, The Hours and To Die For, and has recently been seen in the controversial thrillers Stoker and The Paperboy.
Nicole's Magic is the largest and most comprehensive fansite for Nicole, and is dedicated to supporting her and her career. As of March 2013, Nicole's Magic is entering a new phase of its fansite life, now focussing on paying tribute to Nicole's career up to and including 2006. Read more about what this entails here, and how you can keep up to date with her current career here. Nicole is our favourite actress, and we feel that this way we can provide a highly extensive and worthy tribute to this incredible woman. Comments, suggestions, sparkling diamonds, elephant love medleys and contributions are always more than welcomed so please contact me if you have anything to say. Enjoy your visit, add us to your Favourites and come back again soon!
NB: As part of our site overhaul, all of our content is moving over to a new system. While these changes take place many of the pages within this site will not work/give errors - please be patient as I work to fix them as quickly as I can!
Movie Of The Month
As part of a bi-monthly feature here at Nicole's Magic, each month we will be taking a look back at one of Nicole's films or acting projects. Nicole has an immense body of work behind her, and there's no better way to be reminded of her talent and how much we love her than immersing ourselves and taking an in depth look at those works.
"Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself..."
While this main site is now only focussing on Nicole's career up to 2006, you can still keep up-to-date with her current activities on our forum. Visit Nicole's Bulletin for the latest news and photos, and be sure to register to be able to post your own messages, and get access to even more Nicole chat and interaction.
This is a great interview from early 2003 for The Hours, with quotes from director Stephen Daldry, producer Scott Rudin and co-star Meryl Streep. It also talks about why Nicole was chosen for the role:
Nicole Kidman explains her disappearing act in ‘The Hours’ LA Times, January 3rd 2003
To Nicole Kidman, acting isn’t a mere technical feat; it’s the art of transformation. To hear her tell it, the change can be as dramatic as a caterpillar-into-butterfly metamorphosis. She’ll be working and working to get under the skin of a character, such as author Virginia Woolf in her new film “The Hours,” and suddenly — click! — she’ll be there.
“You can’t delineate exactly when it happens,” Kidman said. “All you know is: Everything starts to flow, and suddenly you’re walking differently, you’re talking differently, you’re thinking differently, your whole demeanor is in relation to what you’re shooting a lot of the time, mood-wise even.” The 35-year-old Australian-raised actress, who maintains her accent in conversation if rarely on screen anymore, was sipping black coffee with a Diet Coke chaser while trying to recover from Romania-via-London-to-New York jet lag in a well-appointed Midtown hotel suite. Her blond hair pinned up, Kidman is as tall, skinny and striking as you might expect, but she offsets any golden-goddess notions with a casual, confident articulateness and frequent, earthy laughter.
A glamorous super-celebrity like Kidman wouldn’t be everybody’s idea of a match for the reclusive, suicidal Woolf. Yet “she was the first person I asked to be in the movie,” “Hours” producer Scott Rudin said. “As much as I love Merchant-Ivory, I didn’t want this to feel like an English period movie, and I was very eager to have someone who had a much more modern take on the character, and I thought she would have that, and she did. I’d worked with her on [the play] ‘The Blue Room,’ so I knew her, and I had seen her invent 11 characters in the course of an evening, so I knew she had the soul of a character actress.”
Stephen Daldry, who directed “The Hours,” said he initially was surprised by Rudin’s suggestion. “He said it. I went, ‘Noooo,’ ” Daldry recalled. “And then I went, ‘Yesss.’ ”
Here’s another interview Nic gave whilst promoting The Hours back in 2002:
The Hours : Moving Forward on My Own : An Interview with Nicole Kidman BlackFilm.com, December 20th 2002
On the heels of being nominated last year for “Moulin Rouge”, the Oscar buzz is circling once again for Nicole Kidman. Besides MR, she also had “The Others” which was financially and critically successful. The Oscar buzz this year is for a role many may not recognize her in because her appearance is totally different. In a dream cast, Nicole is paired with Oscar Winner Meryl Streep and Julianna Moore in “The Hours. In an interview with blackfilm.com, Ms. Kidman talks about how taking this role was good for her.
WM: Did you think you could portray Virginia Wolf?
NK: I was very frightened because I thought if this doesn’t work I am going to really have egg on my face. But the director just said, ‘be bold’ and basically took my hand and guided me in terms of saying, ‘you can do it’ because I didn’t think that I could. Once I started to research her I just fell in love with her. This woman is such a magnificent creature. The way in which she had this enormous intellect and then this extraordinary agility and to combine the two; her emotional agility with her unrivaled intellect creates this bubbling chemistry. I’m just fascinated by her.
WM: This role came at a time when things were roller coasting in your life. Was taking this role good for you?
NK: I think the lines are very blurred now. I try to analyze it too much because I just now work primarily off of my instinct whereas before I couldn’t do that as much because there were so many other things that were more important. In some way the work and the opportunities I’ve had in terms of work have been my saving grace. My children first and foremost gave me day by day the desire to live and then in terms of being able to express myself through different women who are extraordinarily rich. My agent Kevin (Huvane) forced me onto that plane because I tried to pull out of it because I didn’t want to work. I wanted to be with my children and didn’t want to work at all and this was the only thing I did that year.
In this interview from 2002, Nic talks about how she discovered Virginia Woolf at just the right time, the possiblity of Oscar nominations for her and her The Hours co-stars, and she also mentions some of her then-upcoming projects:
Kidman embraced difficult role Sydney Morning Herald, December 30th 2002
Nicole Kidman used to be afraid of Virginia Woolf, preferring the romantic worlds of the Bronte sisters or Jane Austen to Woolf’s demanding prose.
However, when it came time to play Woolf on screen in The Hours, Kidman embraced the British author heart and soul.
“If you take on a role, you take it on. You don’t have somebody else step in and do the hard bits,” Kidman, 35, said in an interview for The Hours, which co-stars Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore and is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Kidman agreed to wear a prosthetic nose that made her almost unrecognisable, a look that vexed her two children, who referred to her as “that Woolf woman”.
Rather than let a double do last-minute close-ups of Woolf’s hand as she wrote, Kidman insisted on returning to London from the United States to shoot the scenes, learning to write right-handed. She refused to let a double do any takes in a cold, rushing river where the crew re-enacted Woolf’s suicide.
Above all, Kidman now adores the richly internalised, frank and fanciful works of the author, who killed herself in 1941 at age 59.
This interview isn’t strictly about our Movie Of The Month The Hours, but it does feature a nice quote from the films director Stephen Daldry, and is a good old read. We already have scans from it in our Gallery (click the thumbnails below), but here is the text interview if you’d like to read it that way:
A Happy Nicole Kidman
Bouncing Back From A Painful Divorce With Two Critically Acclaimed Movies In Tow, Nicole Has Something To Smile About
Forget the fawning critics, the smitten costars, the adoring directors, the crate-load of awards. For Nicole Kidman, the accolade that mattered most arrived with a meal. “I was in a restaurant the other night, and the waitress came up to me and said, ‘Ah, you finally look happy,’ ” Kidman, 34, explains. “I said, ‘Really?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, you looked really sad all last year. And it’s just so nice to see you looking happy.’ That was the biggest compliment I’ve received in a long time.”
And that’s saying something, since these days Kidman is up to her curls in compliments. Hollywood loves a good comeback story, and hers is a doozy. In the difficult months since she was blind-sided by Tom Cruise’s bombshell decision to file for divorce in February 2001, she has enjoyed the most rewarding stretch of her movie career—even as her broken heart has yet to fully heal. “I feel like I went through something, and I really went through it,” says Kidman, who shares custody of Isabella, 9, and Connor, 7, with Cruise. “I didn’t try to hide from it or run away from the grief, which I think is important. There are times when I still get sad, but I’m much happier now.”
And why not? The one-two punch of Moulin Rouge, which earned her a Golden Globe award and a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her whimsical turn as a Parisian courtesan, and The Others, a surprise hit thriller that raked in more than $96 million at the box office, proved Kidman is an A-list talent in her own right. She “always did good work, but half the world thought of her as Mrs. Tom Cruise,” says producer-director Sydney Pollack, a close friend of both Tom and Nicole. “Now she has finally come into her own.”
Once considered icy and aloof, Kidman has become a movie star to root for. “The big shock when I met her was that she was the complete opposite of all the things you imagine from pictures of her and Tom in magazines,” says Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann. “She’s this really Aussie girl who’s full of life and has this loud, honking laugh.” A laugh, says Kidman’s close friend, The Guardian’s Simon Baker, which “is definitely more mule than human.”
The actress welcomes the change in the way audiences perceive her. “People didn’t know me before and I had no idea,” she says. “I must have really been cut off. I was quiet, really quiet. But in the last 18 months, that has just kind of evaporated.” Kidman gracefully handled the probing questions about her heartache from Oprah and Letterman and everyone else as she tirelessly promoted Moulin Rouge and The Others. “So many women come up to me now, and a lot of them have gone through the same thing,” she says. “Whether it’s divorce or a breakup, there’s a kind of camaraderie that’s very poignant.”
This Movie Of The Month is going to be done properly this time And I am very excited about this particular update – I have been able to replace our screencaptures from The Hours with fantastic HD ones! I’m sure you’ll all love these as much as I do. Re-watching the film made me fall in love with it – and Nicole – all over again, and reminded me that it is without doubt my favourite performance of hers. Perhaps aided by the make-up and prosthetic nose, I see no Nicole in this performance – it’s all Virginia, and I can tell everything she’s thinking through her eyes, which to me is always a sign of a great performance. You can see this in the screencaptures too.
Enjoy these fabulous screencaptures!
“It’s all an exploration at the beginning in terms of discovering how she’s going to get under my skin, how I’m going to embody her. It’s almost like playing. You play around, and then it finally starts to layer in.” – Nicole on playing Virginia Woolf
Late as always, but still – we have a new Movie Of The Month/Moment! With it being 10 years since Nic took home the most famous gold man in Hollywood, it’s only appropriate that our Movie Of The Month is The Hours, the 2002 film in which Nic marvelled with her raw and emotional performance as Virginia Woolf. This is a very personal film for Nic, and some of her fans, so we will dedicate a couple of months to highlighting it, with updates consisting of gallery updates, video additions, content and more. If you’d like to submit your thoughts and reviews on the film to be featured on our special page, then just post a comment here or send me an email.
The Movie Of The Month page will be up soon, but in the meantime I have kicked off our The Hours special with a big gallery update. The albums for each of the films screenings have been tidied and updated – duplicated photos have been removed, pictures have been re-added in larger sizes, and additional HQ photos have been uploaded. Nic promoted The Hours at a total of 6 premieres and screenings around the world with her director Stephen Daldry and various combinations of her high calibre co-stars. The Los Angeles and Berlin premieres are some of my all-time favourite looks of Nicole’s, and of course I just love all the photos with Meryl and Julianne!
Dive on into the new gallery updates, and keep checking back for more on The Hours over the coming days and weeks …
Hello Nicole fans! As you can see we have an extremely pretty new layout up here! Our previous Moulin Rouge layout was ~perfect~ but it had been up for almost 2 years, and I felt like we needed something fresh up here. So Megan came up with this beautiful and ethereal design featuring photos from Nic’s 2005 Vanity Fair photoshoot, which is one of my favourites. The Gallery has a matching design, too. Do you love the layouts as much as I do?! Comment with your thoughts!
This new layout marks the start of our ‘new phase‘ which I have mentioned many times before. The first step of this will be converting our content to a new format – this makes it easier for me to update, but won’t change anything for you (except you will be able to search the site much easier). Therefore at the moment, most of the pages within the site will either not work or will give errors. Because we have so many content pages it will take me a while to get everything working again, but I will try to get the basics done asap so please bare with me. There is lots of good stuff to come for Kidman fans
I’ve been a busy Nicole webmiss today, and following on from the Stoker post earlier, I have now added an additional 400+ HQ photos from Nicole’s appearances so far this year! This includes more from the Oscars and G’Day USA Gala (love that dress!!), plus – finally – photos from Sundance and the Gold Meets Golden Event that Nic attended at the start of the year.
A really big thanks goes to MaryJane and DeA for many of these photos.
Nicole’s new film Stoker was released in various international locations last Friday, and I have now put together a big gallery and news post to celebrate it! The Gallery has been updated with HQ stills, posters, set photos and HD trailer screencaptures, and further down this post are a selection of clips, trailer, and promotional video interviews.
I saw the film yesterday and I loved it! It was so different and dark and twisted, and left me with so many thoughts around it. The whole cast were fantastic, and I think Chan-wook Park made a very unique film, with props to Wentworth Miller on his script too. This is the Nicole I love!! Totally risky, out-there film choices.
Have you seen Stoker? What were your thoughts on it?
And I am very excited about this particular update – I have been able to replace our screencaptures from The Hours with fantastic HD ones! I’m sure you’ll all love these as much as I do. Re-watching the film made me fall in love with it – and Nicole – all over again, and reminded me that it is without doubt my favourite performance of hers. Perhaps aided by the make-up and prosthetic nose, I see no Nicole in this performance – it’s all Virginia, and I can tell everything she’s thinking through her eyes, which to me is always a sign of a great performance. You can see this in the screencaptures too. 
