That is a mixed list – Birth seems to me close to a masterpiece – but Nicole knows that it includes bad choices

That is a mixed list – Birth seems to me close to a masterpiece – but Nicole knows that it includes bad choices, and bad because they seemed safe.That’s why she is at a cross-roads now – nearly 40, married again, but with these films ahead: Fur, in which she plays the photographer Diane Arbus; The Visiting, a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers; a film for Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) where she and Jennifer Jason Leigh play sisters; another film for Jez Butterworth, who made Birthday Girl; a big Australian epic for Baz Luhrmann, with Hugh Jackman; and even a film for Korean director Wong Kar-Wai.If three of those six are good, she could be set up again If one is great, she may get another Oscar. In the space of a few years, the world woke up to her great talent. She had an Oscar for The Hours and, although there wasn’t a single smash hit in her record (in the way Tom had hits), she had pushed her salary up to $15m a picture.Well, she said, I’m a single woman now I have to look after myself. Still, Tom was the powerhouse – what would happen to Nicole? Anyone who had known her long guessed that she would take over her own career and leap forward.In the next few years, no matter her private distress (perhaps because of it), she was dazzling as an actress – singing, dancing, very flirty, very funny in Moulin Rouge!; hardly recognisable as Virginia Woolf – it wasn’t that she actually looked like Virginia, but she didn’t look like Nicole Kidman; The Others, for Alejandro Amenabar, a very unusual horror film; brilliant as a mail-order bride from Russia in Birthday Girl; and then the lead part in Dogville, Lars von Trier’s dark fable on the end of America.You didn’t have to like all those films in the same way, but the range of her choice was so daring and fresh. “Everyone” saw that small show – not least Stephen Daldry, who offered her the role of Virginia Woolf in The Hours, and Baz Luhrmann who asked her to be the lead in Moulin Rouge!, a musical, set in Paris but shot in Australia.There was great gossip over the divorce, because Nicole acted surprised and acted it pretty well Let’s just say they no longer liked each other. But I’d guess that the director Stanley Kubrick, who liked her a lot, was maybe the first person who told her she was in a different category from Tom as an actor.

The film flopped and Kubrick died; a year later the marriage to Cruise was over.But Nicole’s time in London had changed her. She met new people: with writer David Hare and director Sam Mendes she would do The Blue Room on stage at the Donmar Warehouse – nude for 15 seconds. What happened during that prolonged London campaign is very complicated. There was Billy Bathgate, Far and Away (with Tom – one of his few flops), Malice, My Life and even Batman Forever, which wasn’t her film.

Against that, she missed getting cast in Thelma & Louise, Sleepless in Seattle, The Silence of the Lambs and Mary Reilly.To Die For was a script aimed at Patricia Arquette, Meg Ryan orJennifer Jason Leigh, but Nicole and her agent launched an intense campaign to argue that Nicole was this girl, Suzanne Stone, so keen to get on TV that she might kill her husband. Everyone involved says her own determination got her the part – and some who know her add that she got it because she was so like the character in the film That may or may not be flattering. But the result was astonishing – she was smart, wicked, funny, and at last she was in a real movie.Something was released. She then did the bold The Portrait of a Lady with Jane Campion. She developed her own project – In the Cut, with novelist Susanna Moore doing the script.

And then she and Tom signed on for their third film in harness, Eyes Wide Shut. Days of Thunder was as silly as any film she had made, and in the first years with Tom she had work that largely encouraged the legend of “bimbo”. He cast her as Dr Claire Lewicki, a neurosurgeon (at 22!) in Days of Thunder (Top Gun on four wheels) His marriage to Mimi Rogers collapsed. Quicker than anyone had anticipated, Miss Kidman was Mrs Tom Cruise.Nicole was not one of those who regarded this as a terrific advantage.

She was known nationally for appearing in TV mini-series Vietnam and Bangkok Hilton, and that’s why Phillip Noyce cast her in the lead role in his thriller Dead Calm.Dead Calm is still a very taut thriller, and it got noticed in Hollywood Meetings followed, and then suddenly Tom had seen her. Why did those parents let that happen? Because they’d taught Nicole responsibility and because they trusted her. And all the while she was acting in movies and for Australian TV. Her father, Antony, was doing medical research at the University of Hawaii Her mother, Janelle, was teaching nursing. Then they moved to Washington DC where her father researched biochemistry for the National Institutes of Health.It was only in 1971 that the parents took Nicole and her younger sister, Antonia, back to Australia. They lived in the smart North Shore area of Sydney, where Dr Antony Kidman established the Health Psychology Unit at the Royal North Shore Hospital.