Nicole Kidman



 Nicole Mary Kidman, AC (born 20 June 1967) is an Australian actress, singer and film producer. ]  Kidman's film career began in 1983. She starred in various Australian film and television productions until her breakthrough in the 1989 thriller  Dead Calm. Following several films over the early 1990s, she came to worldwide recognition for her performances in  Days of Thunder  (1990),  Far and Away  (1992), and  Batman Forever  (1995). She followed these with other successful films in the late 1990s. Her performance in the musical,  ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moulin_Rouge! Moulin Rouge!]''  (2001) earned her second  Golden Globe Award  and first  Academy Award  nomination for  Best Actress. Her performance as  Virginia Woolf  in the drama film  The Hours  (2002) received critical acclaim and earned Kidman the  Academy Award  for  Best Actress.

Kidman's other notable films include To Die For (1995), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), The Others (2001), Cold Mountain (2003), The Interpreter (2005) and Australia (2008). Her performance in 2010's Rabbit Hole (which she also produced) earned Kidman further accolades, including a third Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. In 2012, she earned her first Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her role in Hemingway & Gellhorn.

Kidman has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF since 1994[3]  and for UNIFEM since 2006.Kidman's work has earned her a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, three Golden Globe Awards, one BAFTA and an Academy Award. In 2006, Kidman was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, and was also the highest-paid actress in the motion picture industry. As a result of being born to Australian parents in Hawaii, Kidman has dual citizenship in Australia and the United States.

Kidman founded and owns the production company Blossom Films.

Early life
Kidman was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, while her Australian parents were temporarily in the United States on educational visas. Kidman can therefore claim citizenship in Australia and the United States. Her father, Antony David Kidman, is a biochemist, clinical psychologist, and author. Her mother, Janelle Ann (née Glenny), is a nursing instructor who edits her husband's books and was a member of the Women's Electoral Lobby. Kidman's ancestry includes Scottish and Irish. At the time of Kidman's birth, her father was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He soon after became a visiting fellow at the National Institute of Mental Health of the United States. Opposed to the war in Vietnam, which was causing social unrest in both Australia and the United States, Kidman's parents participated in anti-war protests while they were living in Washington, D.C. The family returned to Australia when Kidman was four and her parents now live on Sydney's North Shore. Kidman has a younger sister, Antonia Kidman, a journalist and TV presenter.

 Kidman attended Lane Cove Public School and North Sydney Girls' High School. She was enrolled in ballet at three and showed her natural talent for acting in her primary and high school years.Kidman revealed she was timid as a child, saying, "I am very shy – really shy – I even had a stutter as a kid, which I slowly got over, but I still regress into that shyness. So I don’t like walking into a crowded restaurant by myself; I don’t like going to a party by myself." In 1984, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which caused Kidman to temporarily halt her education and help provide for the family by working as a  massage therapist  at age seventeen. She studied at the  Victorian College of the Arts  in  Melbourne ,  Victoria, and at the Phillip Street Theatre in Sydney, with actress and friend  Naomi Watts  who had attended the same high school. This was followed by attending the  Australian Theatre for Young People. Here she took up drama, mime and performing in her teens, finding acting to be a refuge. Due to her fair skin and naturally red hair, the Australian sun forced the young Kidman to rehearse in halls of the theatre. A regular at the  Phillip Street Theatre, she received both encouragement and praise to pursue acting full-time.

[edit] Relationships and children
Kidman with husband Keith Urban at the 2009 American Music AwardsKidman has been married twice: first to actor Tom Cruise, and now to country singer Keith Urban. She has an adopted son and daughter with Cruise as well as two biological daughters with Urban.

 Kidman met Cruise in November 1989 on the set of their 1990 movie Days of Thunder. She and Cruise were married on Christmas Eve 1990 in Telluride, Colorado. The couple adopted a daughter, Isabella Jane (born 1992),   and a son, Connor Anthony (born 1995). On 5 February 2001, the couple's spokesperson announced their separation. Cruise filed for divorce two days later, and the marriage was dissolved in August of that year, with Cruise citing irreconcilable differences. In her 2007 interview with  Marie Claire, Kidman noted the incorrect reporting of the  ectopic pregnancy  early in her marriage. "It was wrongly reported [as miscarriage], by everyone who picked up the story." "So it's huge news, and it didn't happen." In the June 2006 issue of  Ladies' Home Journal, she said she still loved Cruise: "He was huge; still is. To me, he was just Tom, but to everybody else, he is huge. But he was lovely to me and I loved him. I still love him." In addition, she has expressed shock about their divorce.

Nicole Kidman in August 2006, prior the start of filming as Marisa Coulter in The Golden CompassPrior to marrying Cruise, Kidman lived with Australian stage actor Marcus Graham in the late 1980s. In the mid-1980s, she dated her Windrider co-starTom Burlinson, whom she lived with on and off for three years, according to biographer Andrew Morton. She dated musician Lenny Kravitz from 2003 to 2004. Robbie Williams stated that he had a short romance with Kidman on her yacht in 2004. In a 2007 interview, Kidman revealed that she was secretly engaged to someone between her marriages to Cruise and Urban but did not identify who this was.

Kidman met her second husband, Australian country singer Keith Urban, at G'Day LA, an event honouring Australians, in January 2005. They married on 25 June 2006, at Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel in the grounds of St Patrick's Estate, Manly in Sydney. They maintain homes in Sydney, Sutton Forest (New South Wales, Australia), Los Angeles, and Nashville (Tennessee, USA). The couple's first daughter, Sunday Rose Kidman Urban, was born in 2008, in Nashville. Kidman's father said the daughter's middle name was after Urban's late grandmother, Rose. In 2010, Kidman and Urban had their second daughter, Faith Margaret Kidman Urban, via surrogacy at Nashville's Centennial Women's Hospital. Faith's middle name is after Kidman's late grandmother.

[edit] Religious and political views
Kidman is a practising Roman Catholic. She attended Mary Mackillop Chapel in North Sydney. Following criticism of The Golden Compass by Catholic leaders as anti-Catholic, Kidman told Entertainment Weekly that "the Catholic Church is part of her 'essence'", and that her religious beliefs would prevent her from taking a role in a film she perceived was anti-Catholic.

 During her divorce from Tom Cruise, she stated that she did not want their children raised as Scientologists. She has been reluctant to discuss Scientology since her divorce.

Kidman's name was in an advertisement in the Los Angeles Times in August 2006 that condemned Hamas and Hezbollah and supported Israel in the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.

Kidman has donated to U.S. Democratic party candidates.

[edit] Wealth, philanthropy and honours
Kidman signing autographs at the premier of The Golden Compass in 2007In 2002, Kidman first appeared on the Australian rich list published annually in the Business Review Weekly with an estimated net worth of A$122 million. In the 2011 published list, Kidman's wealth was estimated at A$304 million, down from A$329 million in 2010.

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;">Kidman has raised money for, and drawn attention to, disadvantaged children around the world. In 1994, she was appointed a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF,<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-BBC-2006-01-26_3-1" style="line-height:1em;">[3]  and in 2004, she was honoured as a "Citizen of the World" by the United Nations. Kidman joined the Little Tee Campaign for breast cancer care to design T-shirts or vests to raise money to fight the disease; motivated by her mother's own battle with breast cancer in 1984.

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;">In the 2006 Australia Day Honours, Kidman was made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for "service to the performing arts as an acclaimed motion picture performer, to health care through contributions to improve medical treatment for women and children and advocacy for cancer research, to youth as a principal supporter of young performing artists, and to humanitarian causes in Australia and internationally." However, due to film commitments and her wedding to Urban, it was 13 April 2007 that she was presented with the honour. It was presented by the Governor-General of Australia, Major General Michael Jeffery, in a ceremony at Government House, Canberra.

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;">Kidman was appointed goodwill ambassador of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in 2006. In this capacity, Kidman has addressed international audiences at UN events, raised awareness through the media and testified before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs to support the International Violence against Women Act. Kidman visited Kosovo in 2006 to learn about women's experiences of conflict and UNIFEM's support efforts. She is the international spokesperson for UNIFEM's Say NO – UNiTE to End Violence against Women initiative. Kidman and the UNIFEM executive director presented over five million signatures collected during the first phase of this to the UN Secretary-General on 25 November 2008.

<p style="margin-top:0.4em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:19.1875px;color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:sans-serif;font-size:13px;">In the beginning of 2009, Kidman appeared in a series of postage stamps featuring Australian actors. She, Geoffrey Rush, Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett each appear twice in the series: once as themselves and once as their Academy Award-winning character. On 8 January 2010, alongside Nancy Pelosi, Joan Chen and Joe Torre, Kidman attended the ceremony to help Family Violence Prevention Fund break ground on a new international center located in the Presidio of San Francisco.