Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman has built a career around a striking ability to make composure feel dramatically charged. Across thrillers, musicals, dramas, horror films and television, she has often played characters whose controlled surfaces conceal fear, desire, grief or calculation. Born in Honolulu on 20 June 1967 to Australian parents, Kidman holds Australian and US citizenship and grew up in Sydney after her family returned to Australia. She studied drama and mime at the Phillip Street Theatre and the Australian Theatre for Young People, then began working on screen as a teenager. After early Australian projects including Bush Christmas, BMX Bandits and the miniseries Vietnam, she gained international recognition as Rae Ingram in the tightly wound 1989 thriller Dead Calm. Her subsequent filmography has rarely stayed in one lane. To Die For gave her the calculating aspiring newscaster Suzanne Stone, while Eyes Wide Shut placed her at the centre of Stanley Kubrick’s final film. In 2001, she moved between the heightened romance and musical performance of Moulin Rouge! and the restrained psychological horror of The Others. Her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours brought her the Academy Award for Best Actress, making her the first Australian to win that award. Kidman continued to move between large-scale productions and more unusual material, from Cold Mountain, The Golden Compass and Australia to Birth, Dogville, Stoker and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. She also produced and starred in Rabbit Hole, playing a mother living with profound grief. Television opened another substantial chapter. As Celeste Wright in Big Little Lies, Kidman paired outward control with the private reality of an abusive marriage, winning a Primetime Emmy for her performance and another as a producer of the limited series. She has since combined acting and executive-producing duties on projects including The Undoing, Nine Perfect Strangers, Special Ops: Lioness, Expats and The Perfect Couple. Her later film work includes Being the Ricardos, The Northman and Babygirl, for which she received the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice International Film Festival.