A Nose for Acting

NEW YORK -- Despite living the public life of a global celebrity, her personal life routinely splashed across magazines, Nicole Kidman finds the strength to perform by shrinking her world.

Kidman, now 40, stars in two films this fall, beginning with Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding," the young director's follow-up to 2005's "The Squid and the Whale." In December, she will lend her star power to the big-budget fantasy epic "The Golden Compass."

Although "Margot," which has an intentionally unpolished, '70s aesthetic to it, has received mixed reviews, Kidman's performance is a welcome sight for fans of the actress whose work since winning an Oscar for 2002's "The Hours" has been checkered with duds like 2004's "The Stepford Wives" and 2005's "Bewitched."

It can be difficult to put a finger on what's made Kidman such a star. (She regularly fetches $17 million or more for a film, though she worked for scale on "Margot.")

New York Times critic A.O. Scott once wrote that the secret to her appeal is the "plucky, disciplined indomitability" she brings to her performances. Film critic David Thomson, who wrote a book last year about Kidman, has called her "the bravest, the most adventurous and most varied" actress of her time.

Neither explanation seem to jibe with Kidman's description of herself as shy. But it could be Kidman's particular blend of reticence and abandon that has helped build her acting reputation. Even when she throws herself into a role, she maintains a mysterious distance, whether in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999) or as Virginia Woolf in "The Hours."

"For me, it's a very, very private, very intimate place to exist, and I do that with a director in a small little bubble," she said during a recent interview. "And that suits my personality, which is a little more introverted but still in huge desire of sharing ideas and intimacies and secrets and all of those things. I like the delicacy of acting."

Kidman became known to American audiences with 1990's "Days of Thunder," where she met Tom Cruise, her former husband of 10 years.

Their divorce in 2001 coincided with her most successful period. She starred in Baz Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge!" and "The Others" in 2001, and followed up those films with "The Hours" as well as Lars von Trier's "Dogville."

"I'm curious. I will remain curious. I want to be brave," she said, explaining what she laughingly calls her "erratic" choices. "I'm not interested in what I know. I know what I am and what I'm capable of, so I'm not interested in exploring those things."