June 20th. An international holiday, a celebration of talent, a day of joy for the wig industry... you know which day it is: it's Nicole Kidman's birthday. The main bitch, the original Legend. Oscar and Emmy winner, future Survivor constestant, amateur clapper. Is there something Nicole-related that isn't iconic? No, there isn't.
After Marion Cotillard went into early retirement (and I will believe Annette exists when I see it with my own two eyes), Nicole Kidman regained the throne as my favorite actress. A new day was born, 2017 rolled over and so it began: The Nicole Kidman Renaissance (or Kidmanaissance, as I called it and repeated to my friends and family until they wouldn't listen anymore).
I can pretend Marion is staring at her, I can pretend Nine wasn't a flop and they shared scenes, I can close my eyes and forget they almost starred in The Danish Girl together but then we got Eddie Redmayne... I can do all that; and I should be allowed to do that.
But pretending we discovered her talent with Big Little Lies is a very revisionist version of her career and achievements. Nicole Kidman has proven her worth from the start, even if the world and the industry didn't seem ready to pay attention for a while. Since today is her birthday, and she won (by a nose) the poll I made on twitter over Marion Cotillard (which will get her own entry some day soon), this is as good an opportunity as any to dive into a retrospective of her work, and to see why the word "Renaissance" has been linked to it from the very beginning.
Since I'll talk about those films of her I have seen, and I have seen A LOT, I'll divide it in three separate entries, with films in chronological order. This first one will cover her beginnings and rise to fame; the second one, the middling mid-2000s to mid-2010s; and, the third, the Nicole Kidman Renaissance.
During this time, you'll be able to vote for your favorite Nicole Kidman performance here. I don't know exactly how much time it will take me to write the three posts, so the poll doesn't have a deadline (I wouldn't now how to add it, though jajaja). When the third entry is published, I'll let you know how much time you have left here and on twitter, and finally, I'll make a fourth one with the results.
I'm so excited to talk about my main girl, so without further ado, here it begins: Nicole Kidman, her beginnings and rise to fame.
Nicole's Australian origins is probably the period of her career I have seen less films of. Dead calm is one of the last movies from her I've watched, and although she brings her typically fierce commitment to the role, it's torture to witness all she goes through. I'm sorry Miss Queen, but the gun and the spear thingy were there from the start. Had it been me, Billy Zane and that useless dog would've been out in five minutes.
Murdering your husband so you can be on television? Check. Serving looks? Check. Using Casey Affleck so he'll do your dirty work and then framing him for the crime? Check, check, check. By the time this film was being made, Hollywood already thought Nicole had no talent, because she had spent the previous five years fighting Scientology from within. With To Die For, she proved her range and talent for comedy, something which the industry has seemingly forgotten since.
Does anyone even know what this film is about? No, you don't. Because Tom Cruise is the lead in it, and you couldn't care less about what that little goblin says or does. Nicole is in it mainly in the beginning, but did she conclude here her Scientology annihilation by serving looks the likes of which have not been seen since and outshining Cruise in every scene she's in? Oh, absolutely. Her weed-induced epiphany is cinematic history.
By far Nicole's best wig. The early 2000s were the beginning of her rise to worldwide stardom. If you mention her name to your older family members, they'll say something misogynistic about her appearance and then they'll mention Moulin Rouge. For those who still saw her as Tom Cruise's wife, she proved she could act, sing, dance, break her ribs while attempting to tighten her corset to Vivien Leigh levels, and defrost the Ice Queen trope that had been assigned to her. Her Your Song bloopers with a never hotter Ewan McGregor have more chemistry than 99% of Hollywood sex scenes.
Did you know this was a Spanish film? The director, Alejandro Amenábar, is from my country, and this is one of Nicole's most iconic and remembered movies. Going from Moulin Rouge to The Others in the span of one year is what proves that she can do anything. When I say Grinch hands, you say range! Grinch hands...! This character also goes to show that Nicole has always had an ecclectic taste when it comes to her choices and that she likes her movies with a bit of edge in them. This is peak movie star era, and she anchors the film with her charisma and electrifying presence.
In my opinion, her best. She's been in indie stuff, in more daring, less baity productions and roles, but her train station scene in The Hours can not be topped. Her ability to go from suffocated to enraged, to mesmerized by the concept of death allowed her to win a Best Actress Oscar even if she had the least amount of screentime among her acting counterparts (an excellent Julianne Moore, in one of her best depressed-50s-housewife roles; and She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, who overacted through all her scenes, as she does). This film, along with Nicole and Julianne's performances in it, lighted the fire of my love for cinema and actresses, and I will forever be grateful for it.
In this blog, we don't claim Lars von Trier, and I can only imagine the shit he made her go through during filming, but Nicole's performance in it is absolutely magnetic. The fact that she chose to do this project, shot in what looks like an oversized garage, right after winning an Oscar should tell you everything about her commitment to the craft and her blind belief in art as an expression form. She's a character actress trapped in the body of a movie star, and it was never as clear as here.
As far as memory goes, this was my first Nicole Kidman film. I saw it over and over because they kept showing it on TV on sunday afternoons and my enthrallment with it should've probably been and early sign that I was gay as hell. It was also the peak of Renée Zellweger's career, back when the world was good and her, Nicole and Julianne had all the good roles. Needless to say, I learned all of Zellgy's iconic lines by hard. Also iconic? Nicole's character says "I can nail Jude Law even though I have only talked to him twice and then he went to war!". And she does... An inspiration to us all.
And then came the mid-2000s and they were like... They tried to kill your famous— your favorite bitch! If you are around my age, a 90s kid, you came across Nicole's career when it was, pretty much, in the toilet. I was lucky enough to really start being invested in cinema in the late 2000s, and my first full on awards race was 2010 (her Rabbit Hole comeback), but the world still had a twisted enough sense of humor to put my two favorite actresses (Nicole and Marion Cotillard) in the first flop I stanned: Nine.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll cover all that in the next extry. Until then, don't forget to vote for your favorite performance HERE and do share your thoughts on the movies I've talked about so far in the comments. Do not fail Legend!
Do it for her
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