PROFILE: Kidman cops a battering in Australia

By Sid Astbury Dec 5, 2008, 6:56 GMT

   Sydney - She's a Hollywood actor whose flawless face radiates from a thousand magazine covers. An Oscar-winner and new mother, she's married to another big-name Australian in the performing arts.

   She's Cate Blanchett and Australians adore her. With playwright hubby Andrew Upton, she manages to run the Sydney Theatre Company and star in films.

   Blanchett unites Australians in devotion; Nicole Kidman, the nation's other screen goddess, divides them. People rarely bad-mouth Blanchett; the internet is full of bile about Kidman.       

   Since last month's premiere of Australia, a Baz Luhrmann film in which she stars alongside Hugh Jackman, Kidman has had to read some dreadful reviews and fend off some very hurtful barbs.

   Melanie Reid, writing in the London Times, said she's 'one of the most overrated actors in the world, a woman who has been the kiss of death in practically every movie she has starred in.'

   Listeners to radio stations in Sydney, her home town, have rung in to condemn her character and her performance in the most expensive film ever made in Australia. Readers of national newspapers have written in to blame her personally for the disappointing box office takings.

   She has been berated for leaving her homeland. Like country crooner Keith Urban, a fellow Australian and the father of her 5-month-old daughter, she has lived in the United States for most of the past 20 years.

   Internet sites have sprung up deriding Kidman for being 'frozen, brittle and vapid' and for having the 'emotional scope of a spoon.' She has been called a liar for denying her beauty is chemically enhanced.

   Industry people have galloped to her defence. Margaret Pomerantz, perhaps Australia's best-known film reviewer, praised Kidman's lead role in the romantic melodrama as 'quite the loveliest I've seen Nicole on screen.'

   New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis declared her 'wonderfully and fully expressive here, from wince-worthy start to heartbreaking finish, whether she's wrinkling her nose in mock disgust or rushing across a dusty field, her arms pumping so wildly that it's a wonder well water doesn't spring from her mouth.'

   Some have wondered aloud whether the cool reception for Luhrmann's epic, and the likelihood that it won't recoup its cost, will see Kidman's acting career fade away.

   A renewed delight in family life could keep her at home in Nashville, Tennessee anyway.

   'The rhythm of my life has certainly changed,' Kidman told reporters in Paris at the European launch of Australia. 'Now, I want to keep telling some beautiful stories ... but a lot of me is about just getting to my family.'

   Recent films - Cold Mountain, Bewitched, The Interpreter, The Golden Compass and The Invasion - haven't filled cinemas. She hasn't had a big box-office success since winning an Oscar for The Hours in 2003.

   Defending her record earlier this year, Kidman said: 'You're either good at what you do and you'll be employed, or you won't. I think it's that simple.'

   Kidman, now 41, has spoken before of retiring when she reached 40.

   Speaking to the newspaper USA Today last month, the former wife of fellow Hollywood star Tom Cruise said she was ready to sacrifice to make her second marriage work.

   'We're both willing to move mountains to make it work - and you still touch wood. You commit to it and say 'whatever we can do that's humanly possible, we're going to do,'' she said.

   Kidman met Urban, 40, in January 2005 and they married 18 months later. Sunday Rose is her first child, although she adopted two children during her 10-year marriage to Cruise, a union that ended in 2001.