Nicole Kidman

No Hollywood star has delivered a sermon on the magic of cinema as widely quoted as hers: her advert for AMC cinemas, that "we come to this place for magic", became a pop phenomenon in 2021, an eternal meme and a rallying cry for audiences returning after the pandemic, delivered completely deadpan, which is exactly why it worked, so much so that the chain shot new instalments years later. That the part went to Nicole Kidman is no accident. Born in Honolulu on 20 June 1967, where her Australian parents gave her the Hawaiian nickname Hokulani, "heavenly star", few careers sum up love of the craft better: more than forty years of relentless reinvention.

From Sydney to Hollywood

The daughter of a renowned psychologist, Antony Kidman, and a nursing instructor, Janelle, she grew up in the Sydney suburb of Longueville between ballet and theatre classes. When her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1984, the teenage Nicole even trained as a massage therapist to help with her treatment, an episode she has always pointed to as the one that forged her character.

She debuted as a teenager in BMX Bandits (1983) and truly announced herself with the maritime thriller Dead Calm (1989), opposite Sam Neill, the role that opened Hollywood's doors.

She walked through them the following year with Days of Thunder (1990), where she met Tom Cruise: they married that same December and adopted two children, Isabella and Connor. Together they reunited on Far and Away (1992), while she earned a Golden Globe nomination for Billy Bathgate (1991), shot the school drama Flirting (1991) back home and strung together Malice (1993) and Batman Forever (1995).

Her first major work arrived with the ruthless weathergirl of To Die For (1995), rewarded with a first Golden Globe and the role that convinced critics she was far more than a superstar's wife. She then added The Portrait of a Lady (1996), by Jane Campion, the thriller The Peacemaker (1997) and the witchy Practical Magic (1998), a cult comedy time would eventually hand back to her. In 1998, moreover, she set London and Broadway alight with the play 'The Blue Room', whose most famous review branded her "pure theatrical Viagra".

Kubrick, the Moulin Rouge and an Oscar

The turn of the century lifted her to another level. With Cruise she starred in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the final film of Stanley Kubrick, after a marathon shoot that stretched beyond a year, and in 2001, the year of her much publicised divorce, about which she famously joked that she could finally wear heels again, she pulled off an unrepeatable double: the courtesan Satine in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, doing her own singing and earning a first Oscar nomination, and the tormented mother of The Others, the ghost story by Alejandro Amenábar, shot between Madrid and Cantabria, that became one of the most successful Spanish productions ever made.

Full consecration arrived with The Hours (2002): her Virginia Woolf, unrecognisable under a prosthetic nose that generated as much talk as her performance, won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, along with the BAFTA and the Golden Globe, sharing the film with Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore. Far from settling, she chose risk: the Brechtian experiment Dogville (2003), by Lars von Trier, the war melodrama Cold Mountain (2003), which brought another Golden Globe nomination, the unsettling Birth (2004) and The Human Stain (2003).

There were blockbusters and stumbles too: The Interpreter (2005), The Stepford Wives (2004), Bewitched (2005), The Golden Compass (2007), Luhrmann's epic Australia (2008), the musical Nine (2009) and her voice in Happy Feet (2006).

Indie reinvention and two Emmys with 'Big Little Lies'

When the machine seemed to be running dry, Kidman reinvented herself as a producer and a muse of auteur cinema. Through her company Blossom Films she willed Rabbit Hole (2010) into existence, earning a third Oscar nomination, and stunned with her wild Southern turn in The Paperboy (2012).

Precious oddities and prestige followed: Stoker (2013), the villain of Paddington (2014), Grace of Monaco (2014), which opened Cannes, a fourth Oscar nomination for Lion (2016), The Beguiled (2017) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), by Yorgos Lanthimos, as well as transforming into a broken detective for Destroyer (2018) and moving audiences in Boy Erased (2018).

There was time for everything: the thriller Secret in Their Eyes (2015) with Julia Roberts, the dramas Before I Go to Sleep (2014) and The Railway Man (2013) with Colin Firth, The Goldfinch (2019), the musical The Prom (2020) by Ryan Murphy and even comedy with Adam Sandler in Just Go with It (2011), not to mention oddities such as Queen of the Desert (2015), Strangerland (2015) and Genius (2016).

Television crowned her second golden age. After Top of the Lake, again with Jane Campion, she produced and starred with Reese Witherspoon in the phenomenon Big Little Lies (2017), the Liane Moriarty adaptation whose abused Celeste brought her two Emmy Awards, as actress and as producer, plus another Golden Globe, and whose second season added Meryl Streep to the cast. Then came the ratings sensation The Undoing (2020), opposite Hugh Grant, Nine Perfect Strangers (2021), also from Moriarty, with Kidman as the enigmatic wellness guru Masha and back with an Alpine second season in 2025, the Hong Kong set 'Expats', 'Special Ops: Lioness' with Zoe Saldaña and Netflix's hit The Perfect Couple (2024).

The blockbuster never vanished either: she was Queen Atlanna, the hero's mother, in Aquaman (2018), her biggest hit with more than a billion dollars grossed, and in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023), appeared in Bombshell (2019) and earned a fifth Oscar nomination as Lucille Ball in Being the Ricardos (2021), the biopic written by Aaron Sorkin, before reigning as Gudrún in the Viking saga The Northman (2022), by Robert Eggers, and producing and starring in Wicked Little Letters (2023).

'Babygirl', 'Scarpetta' and Hollywood's busiest woman

Approaching sixty, she is living one of the boldest stretches of her career. Her desire driven executive in Babygirl (2024), by Halina Reijn, an erotic thriller that reopened the conversation about female desire on screen, won her the Volpi Cup for Best Actress in Venice, one of world cinema's oldest acting prizes, an award she could not collect: her mother, Janelle, died that very week. She had just released the Netflix comedy A Family Affair (2024) and voiced the animated Spellbound (2024).

The pace never slows: she produced and starred in Holland (2025) for Prime Video, premiered the series 'Scarpetta' in March 2026, playing Patricia Cornwell's forensic pathologist opposite Jamie Lee Curtis with two seasons already ordered, and September 2026 brings Practical Magic 2, the long awaited sequel she produces and stars in once again with Sandra Bullock, almost three decades after the original and after years of fan campaigning.

The honours keep pace: she became the first Australian performer to receive the AFI Life Achievement Award, holds the Companion of the Order of Australia, her country's highest civilian distinction, and has served since 2006 as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, focused on the fight against gender violence, after years working with UNICEF. Time magazine has twice named her among the most influential people in the world, and her name has sat among the best paid actresses on the planet for two decades.

Keith Urban, her daughters and the goodbye

Her second great love story began in 2005, when she met the country musician Keith Urban at an Australian gala in Los Angeles. They married at Sydney's Cardinal Cerretti chapel in June 2006, made their home in Nashville and soon overcame their first great test, his spell in rehab, for which he always credited her with saving him. They had two daughters, Sunday Rose (2008) and Faith Margaret (2010), the latter born via gestational surrogate, and for almost two decades they were one of the most solid marriages between Hollywood and Nashville. From her years with Cruise she keeps Isabella and Connor, with whom she maintains a relationship as discreet as everything else in her private life.

Which is why the ending surprised everyone: they separated in 2025, she filed for divorce in September and the settlement was closed in January 2026, with no alimony between the parties and the actress as primary carer of the girls. True to her style, she has handled the split with absolute discretion, devoted to her daughters and her work, while Urban returned to the road with his tour.

Because if Nicole Kidman has proved anything, it is that nothing stops her: not fashions, not age, not life's blows. Almost sixty years, one Oscar, two Emmys, five Academy Award nominations and an impossible diary later, she keeps coming to this place, as her famous advert says, for the magic. And audiences keep coming with her. A second season of Scarpetta, in fact, is already on the way.

The earliest credit MovieNCo has for Nicole Kidman is Bush Christmas (1983); in all, 78 films and 6 TV shows over 43 years. They have worked as actress in 83 and producer in 6. Their title most voted by MovieNCo readers is Big Little Lies (2017), with 87 votes. Their busiest decade is the 2010s, with 29 titles. The person they have worked with most is Harvey Weinstein, on 8 films, among them The Others and Nine.