SHOWBIZ: She kids you not

Kidman balances the wild streak in her with practicality

NICOLE Kidman, movie star, Oscar winner and red-carpet regular, recently played a cow. Talk about glamour roles.

The performance was for an enactment of Jack And The Beanstalk, which took place in her Nashville home as she was putting her 4-year-old daughter, Sunday, to bed. She also impersonated the fairytales stem-climbing hero while her husband, country singer Keith Urban, played the magic beans.

Im like, I cant read this book again for the 100th time, so I said, Were going to do it!, said Kidman, 45. (The couple also has a 19-month-old daughter, Faith, and Kidman has a daughter, Isabella, 19, and a son, Connor, 17, from her marriage to Tom Cruise.)

Sunday sat on her bed and watched us. She was into it, she said. Then she laughed. Well, she didnt tell us to stop.

After nearly 30 years of making movies, no one is telling Kidman to stop taking on roles that challenge both her and what moviegoers think they know about her.

Over a cappuccino at a Manhattan hotel last month, she discussed her career and her latest unlikely role: As a Southern floozy in the intentionally pulpy drama The Paperboy, opening Oct 5.

Directed by Lee Daniels, the maker of Precious, the film earned both cheers and jeers for its audacity when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

Kidman, an elegant blonde, is strikingly tall (180cm) and looked even taller in a chic black pantsuit. She spoke precisely but with an easy sense of humour.

You can ask me pretty much anything, she volunteered. Therell be things Ill go, That feels a little too personal. But most things I dont have a fear of being asked about.

Her career is founded on a drive to get inside the characters she plays. When she! was you nger, acting was about escaping her own insecurities by becoming someone else. Now, she said, its the desire to study the human condition, the desire for collaboration, to learn and absorb, and to lead a well-examined life.

Asked to name a role model for the next decade or two of her career, she instantly picked French actress Isabelle Huppert. I love the danger in her career, Kidman said.

Director Baz Luhrmann, her friend, fellow Aussie and two-time collaborator (Moulin Rouge! and Australia), said that Kidman was a rare breed.

Nicole is a serious actor and an iconic movie star. This combination doesnt come along all that often. Off screen, she can be fantastically down to earth, straight to the point, and a whole lot of fun, with a particularly Aussie sense of humour that doesnt take itself too seriously, he said.

Another close friend, actress Naomi Watts, praised Kidmans way of navigating between commercial and independent films.

I think Nic has a wild streak in her and a very practical streak, and she manages to balance both very well, and thats evident in her work, Watts said in a phone interview. Shes a fascinating and complicated woman full of contradictions, and thats what makes her work so deep and interesting.

Put The Paperboy in the wild streak column. Based on the 1995 novel by Pete Dexter, the movie features Kidman as a seemingly hot-to-trot woman named Charlotte, a resident of a small town in Florida in 1969.

She writes romantic letters to prison inmates and cavorts about in derriere-hugging gold lame pants, tight tops and straightened, teased blond hair. I think straight hair gives me class, Charlotte mistakenly observes.

Kidmans risque Paperboy scenes include a jailhouse make-out session, sans physical contact, with Charlottes fiance, a condemned murderer (played by John Cusack), and an already much-discussed beach scene with a young man (Zac Efron).

I wanted something raw, and I wanted to work with a director who was going to access so! mething different in me, Kidman said of taking the part. The script was really strong, so I was grateful to get the role.

Daniels, who had directed only Precious and Shadowboxer (2005) before The Paperboy, said that Kidmans formidable resume had him feeling intimidated initially. (Besides an Academy Award for her role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours from 2002, she has earned two more Oscar nominations and worked in nearly 40 films).

But she said, Lee, if youre going to direct me, youve got to understand that Im just a plain working girl, said Daniels. And she was.

Born in Hawaii but raised in Sydney (she holds dual American and Australian citizenship) by a psychologist father and nursing instructor mother, Kidman discovered acting early through reading.

I was fair-skinned in a country thats about the outdoors, she said. While others were at the beach, her mother insisted that pale Nic spend most of her day indoors. She passed the time devouring, and being enthralled by, classic novels like Madame Bovary and War And Peace.

I could understand Natasha, and I could be Natasha, she said, recalling her reaction as a 12-year-old to Tolstoys tragic heroine. Even as a child I had a strong relationship with yearning and desire. And loss. Those things spoke to me.

She enrolled in an acting class and was soon working steadily on Australian TV and in movies. Tom Cruise saw her in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm, one of her first adult roles, which led to her being cast opposite him in Days Of Thunder (1990) and their subsequent 10-year marriage.

Watts, who has known Kidman since they were teenagers in Sydney and acted with her in the 1991 Australian film Flirting, said: Nicole was ambitious but there was nothing ruthless about her ambition. She was just a woman who knew what she loved, was focused on it and committed, and really, really worked hard on improving all the time.

Her ambition has led to working with major and sometimes iconoclastic directors, including Stanley Kubrick (E! yes Wide Shut) and Anthony Minghella (Cold Mountain), as well as Luhrmann, Gus Van Sant (To Die For), Stephen Daldry (The Hours) and Lars von Trier (Dogville).

I work well with people who are extreme, she said, affectionately lumping in that group Daniels, whose sexually forthright movies invariably offend at least some viewers.

Of the notoriously difficult von Trier, she said: He does things cinematically that nobody else does. And whether you love him or hate him, the filmmaking is incredibly strong.

Thats why, even as she is busy preparing for her forthcoming role as Grace Kelly in Grace of Monaco, she is trying desperately to squeeze into her schedule a small part in von Triers next film, The Nymphomaniac.

Equally difficult was Kubrick, whom she remembers fondly from Eyes Wide Shut, in which she starred with Cruise.

Stanley wanted six months of rehearsal. He didnt want to start, and then he didnt want to finish, she said.

What stayed with her from the experience?

Stanley taught Tom and I, Never say no. When someone proposes an idea, you never shut it down. And thats a good lesson that goes far beyond work. Thats a life lesson.

What Kidman considers saying no to these days are offers that take her away from her young daughters and husband for too long.

Ive worked hard to get to this place personally, she said. I dont take any of it for granted. I cherish it.

Thats why she thinks she will probably have to pass on the von Trier movie. She said: Im more than willing to make those sacrifices because, when Im 70 and 80, I want my family around me. I know other things can come into play about that, but its certainly not going to be because I didnt show up.NYT