Nicole Kidman wins Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival
Nicole Kidman wins Venice best actress for erotic ‘Babygirl’. She admitted her latest film left her ‘exposed and vulnerable and frightened… when it’s given to the world’
One of Hollywood’s biggest stars who is never afraid to push herself, Nicole Kidman ventured even further from her comfort zone with erotic thriller “Babygirl”, which saw her named best actress in Venice on Saturday.
A queen of the silver screen since the 1990s, the Oscar-winning Australian admitted to nerves when the no-holds-barred film from Dutch director Halina Reijn premiered in the Italian watery city last week.
Nicole Kidman, 57, played Romy, a married, high-powered New York CEO who embarks on a torrid, sado-masochistic affair with a new company intern.
Nicole Kidman had delved into the genre in 1999 with her then-husband Tom Cruise in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, “Eyes Wide Shut,” a similarly in-depth look at sexuality and the human psyche.
But she admitted her latest film left her “exposed and vulnerable and frightened… when it’s given to the world”.
Unfortunately she was not in Venice to accept her award, after arriving in the Italian city to hear that her “beautiful, brave mother” Janelle had died.
“I’m in shock, and I have to go to my family. But this award is for her. She shaped me, she guided me, and she made me,” Kidman said in a statement read out by Reijn.
– Master of reinvention –
Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal of writer Virginia Woolf in The Hour in 2003.
Reinvention has been a theme throughout Kidman’s illustrious career, and her chameleon-like skills have propelled the high school dropout from Australian teen movies like BMX Bandits to Hollywood’s A-list.
Never lacking in boldness, she has taken on more risky independent roles over her four decades in the film industry, from Gus Van Sant’s Golden Globe-winning To Die For (1995) to Karin Kusama’s Destroyer (2018).
She was first nominated for a Best Actress Oscar in 2002 after appearing in fellow Australian Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, and was nominated again in 2011 for Rabbit Hole.
In 2017, “Lion,” the story of an Indian-origin young man who is adopted by an Australian family and uses Google Earth to search for long-lost relatives, was nominated again. She was also nominated for an Oscar two years earlier for her role as comedy queen Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos.
– Queen of the big and small screen –
Kidman developed an interest in acting at an early age, after her family moved from her native Honolulu to Sydney when she was four years old.
She made her film debut in the Australian TV movie Bush Christmas in 1983, and dropped out of school at 16 the same year to pursue acting full-time, gaining international recognition in the 1989 thriller Deadly Silence.
The following year, she met Cruise on the set of the racetrack romance Days of Thunder.
The couple married in 1991 and adopted two children, Isabella and Connor, but separated a decade later in one of Hollywood’s most famous divorces. Once one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars, Nicole Kidman retired from acting after falling in love with New Zealand-born country musician Keith Urban and marrying him in 2006.
Like many top actors and directors, Kidman has made the leap to the big screen in recent years, garnering acclaim for a number of TV roles, including the Emmy-winning Big Little Lies and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake.
Nicole Kidman and Urban have two daughters together, Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret.
