Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman

Sign: Sun in Gemini, Moon in Sagittarius

Nicole Kidman, a tall, striking, redheaded Australian actress already had a career of some substance when she gained notoriety in the US as the second wife of superstar Tom Cruise. Kidman began ballet lessons at age three, mime classes at age eight and acting at ten in street theater. She gained notice as a 14-year-old for her performance in Bush Christmas (1983), a film that became a holiday perennial on Aussie TV, and won acclaim for her work in the miniseries Vietnam (1985) from Kennedy-Miller (the production company of producer Byron Kennedy and director George Miller).

Kidman found an international audience playing a terrorized woman on the high seas in the Phillip Noyce-helmed thriller Dead Calm (1989). She made her Hollywood debut as a fetching brain surgeon opposite future husband Tom Cruise as a race car driver in Days of Thunder (1990).

Kidman worked regularly in Hollywood with occasional trips home for work in Australian film and TV, such as in the 1990 feature Flirting (the acclaimed sequel to 1987's The Year My Voice Broke). Back in Hollywood, she played mob moll Drew Preston in Robert Benton's uneven Billy Bathgate (1991), where she exuded a raw sexuality heretofore hidden from American audiences.

Though Nicole Kidman claims to have learned much from working with old pro Dustin Hoffman on the project, her bankability was not enhanced by the film's commercial failure. A reteaming with Cruise in Ron Howard's would-be epic, Far and Away (1992), failed to ignite the box office. 1993 witnessed some professional and personal advances for Kidman. She starred in two high-profile features: Malice, playing a classic femme fatale opposite an equally smarmy Alec Baldwin, and My Life, a high-minded tearjerker with Michael Keaton. 1995 was a banner year for Kidman. She played the female lead opposite Val Kilmer in the high-profile sequel Batman Forever and starred in To Die For, a much smaller-scale Gus Van Sant-directed comedy thriller that created a sensation at Cannes. In the former, one of that summer's most anticipated movies, Kidman played a glamorous criminal psychologist with the hots for the Caped Crusader and Bruce Wayne. In the latter, she shone opposite Matt Dillon as a TV weathercaster with murderous designs on her husband.

Summer 1995 also marked the beginning of lensing on Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady opposite John Malkovich. These three very cannily chosen projects decisively proclaimed that she was no longer just Mrs. Tom Cruise.

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