Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (4 page)

In addition to all the career and relationship issues swirling about Nicole in 1985, she experienced her first real family emergency. She was on the set of
Windrider
when she received an urgent telephone call from her mother. Janelle told her that she had some bad news. She was in the hospital, where she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. Nicole was devastated. She dropped the telephone and found the producers and pleaded with them to allow her to return home. They rejected her request on the grounds that they could not afford a break in production.

Nicole stuck it out until production was completed, then hurried home to be with her mother. “Suddenly the person that you love most in the world is losing her hair and sobbing every night,” Nicole told
Premiere
magazine. “It was very hard on me and it still remains a big thing in my life.”

Janelle underwent a lumpectomy, a new procedure at that time in Australia, then followed up with chemotherapy and radiation, convinced that she was going to die. How ironic it was that Antony’s early research had been on the effects of anxiety and stress on breast cancer. Perhaps fearing that her decision to drop out of school had somehow created the anxiety that triggered the disease, Nicole nursed and took care of her mother with uncompromised compassion, even going to the trouble of qualifying as a masseuse so that she could massage her mother’s aching muscles every day.

“It was very hard to see your mother going through such pain,” Nicole told
Good Weekend
magazine. “It opened my eyes to mortality, and to pain and suffering, and from that point on I was determined to support and be a part of and in some way help. Janelle’s cancer changed the family in profound and lasting ways.”

One result of Janelle’s illness was that Antony resumed his research on breast cancer in order to find out if cognitive behavior therapy could be effective on women with advanced stages of the disease. Like most psychologists, Antony was much better at intellectualizing the problem and looking for solutions outside the family than he was in providing one-on-one support (it is a drawback of the profession). Another outgrowth was Antony’s decision to embrace “psychoncology,” a new field in which therapists work with cancer patients and their families in an effort to help them better cope with the disease. The best way to help Janelle, Antony concluded, was to find new approaches to treating the disease. As it happened, Janelle’s cancer did not recur and today, more than two decades later, she is still cancer free. 

By this point in their marriage, it had become obvious that Janelle had affected Antony’s professional life in a variety of ways. His new focus on breast cancer was an obvious example. Not so obvious was the influence she had on his viewpoints about the changing dynamics of family life in general. He began to see the anxieties and conflicts experienced by women in a more personal context.

“Although women are more positive than men about the prospect of marriage, they are generally less content with the reality of it,” Antony wrote in his 1995 book,
Family Life: Adapting to Change.
. “The dual goals of career and family are more easily achieved by men. For women these goals conflict and can cause severe problems. The fact that more women than men seek professional help during the years of child rearing, when their children reach adulthood and leave home, and when their spouses retire or die, reflects the great stresses brought to bear on women who carry the emotional responsibility for most family relationships.”

Antony understood in 1995 what had perhaps escaped his attention while he and Janelle were busying raising Nicole and Antonia—and trying to pursue their individual careers, one more successfully than the other: namely, that Janelle had paid a high personal price for her devotion to the family unit.

~ ~ ~

After the release of
Windrider
, it was clear to everyone that Nicole was on a roll—down hill. Her next film,
Watch the Shadows Dance
(also known as
Nightmaster
in the United States
),
was directed by Russian-born film-maker Mark Joffe. He had directed two television series—“Fast Lane” and “Carson’s Law”—but
Watch the Shadows Dance
was his first feature film.

Nineteen-year-old Nicole was asked to play the role of Amy Gabriel, a high school student who gets involved with a group of fellow students that play war games with paint guns. The male lead was played by Tom Jennings, whose first film role was in
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
. After completing work on
Watch the Shadows Dance
, he did one feature film and two television shows, then dropped out of public sight.

Also co-starring with Nicole was Joanne Samuel, a twenty-nine-year-old veteran of ten feature films and television series, including “The Young Doctors” and
Mad Max.
Like Jennings, she did two more projects after work on
Watch the Shadows Dance
wrapped, then she, too, dropped out of sight.

The plot of
Watch the Shadows Dance
revolves around the machinations of a mysterious karate teacher and the paint-gun wars, two separate themes that finally merge to create the dramatic tension in the story.

Nicole does not have a single good line in the movie, but the camera loved her face and her mannerisms, despite the contrived tensions that constantly surrounded her. Some of the scenes seem to have been written especially for her. When a young man puts the moves on Nicole, commenting on her legs and arms, one of her “club” members steps in to protect her.  Nicole keeps her cool, but when the guy leaves, she chastises her friend for stepping in. “I can look after myself without your help,” she says. “I’ll do my own fighting, thank you.”

 As it turns out, the karate teacher is a crazed war veteran, a cocaine addict that kills a drug pusher (coincidentally the same youth who accosted Nicole earlier in the film). Jennings witnesses the murder and tells the karate teacher what he saw. Not wishing to be convicted of murder, the karate teacher shows up at the paint-gun games to silence Jennings. From that point on, the resolution of the conflict proceeds along an entirely predictable course.

The acting in
Watch the Shadows Dance
was not spectacular, but it was within limits of other, more successful films in this genre. The idea of a story based on paint-gun warriors was a good one and the soundtrack, most of which was written and sung by Paul Kelly, was above average. The problems with the film lay in the manner in which it was directed and edited. Visually, it never achieved a life of its own.

For Nicole, it represented another regrettable lapse in judgment. Her mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer and she had made two bad films in a row. By the time 1986 ended, Nicole, although only nineteen, was pondering the end of life as she knew it.

Chapter 3

THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

Nineteen-eighty-seven was a make-or-break year for Nicole. From the emotional high of “Vietnam,” she had tumbled into the despair of
Windrider
and
Watch the Shadows Dance
. She had seen it happen so many times before with Australian actors: A high-profile role, followed by local public acclaim, and then a free-fall tumble into obscurity.

It was around this time that the twenty-year-old actress began dreaming of stardom in America. She did not want to become a local has-been; she wanted to perform in the international arena—and the key to that, at least in her case, was to make a name for herself in America. And why not? Legally, she was as much an American as she was an Australian. Hollywood was her birthright, was it not?

 Nicole’s next movie was a comedy titled
The Bit Part
. Co-starring Chris Haywood and Katrina Foster—and directed by Brendan Maher—it did nothing to advance Nicole’s career. The film disappeared from public view almost overnight and today it is next to impossible to find.

Nicole took that hit on the chin and kept going. Her next project was a part on the television series, “Room to Move.” She played the role of Carol Trig, a high school track star who meets a new girl who makes her question her dedication to the sport. Also co-starring in the show was Alyssa-James Cook, with whom Nicole had worked in “Vietnam.”

Artistically, Nicole’s fortunes improved somewhat when she signed on to do the feature film
Flirting,
a coming-of-age story about adolescent romance between two boarding-school students. In the wrong hands, the film could have been another teen exploitation film like
Windrider
and
Watch the Shadows Dance
, but director John Duigan rescued it from that fate, primarily by writing the script himself. Actually,
Flirting
was the second film in a planned trilogy about Danny Embling, an awkward adolescent prone to stuttering and attacks of knee-jerk nerdiness.

In 1987, Duigan was ranked among Australia’s “new wave” film-makers. He got his start in the mid-1970s with a government grant that allowed him to direct low-budget films such as
The Firm Man
and
Trespassers
. With a deft hand for merging detail with the bigger picture, he quickly gained a reputation for “serious” films that dealt with issues.
Sirens
, staring Hugh Grant, Sam Neill, Elle Macpherson and Portia de Rossi, is one of his better post-
Flirting
efforts. Released in 1994, the film explored religious and sexual issues from the viewpoint of a young British reverend.

The Australia film community is minuscule compared to its counterparts in America and England, so it is not uncommon for directors to use the same actors over and over again, especially if they have a public following. Nicole had no reservations about signing on for
Flirting
because Duigan also had been her director in “Room to Move” and “Vietnam.”

Nicole was given the role of Nicola Radcliffe, an older student at the girls’ school where the female lead, played by fifteen-year-old Thandie Newton, attended classes.
Flirting
was Newton’s first motion picture. The daughter of a Zimbabwean mother, a princess of the Shona tribe, and an English father, she lived in Zambia until political and social unrest forced her family to move to England. Before going to Australia to star in her first film, she received in a degree in anthropology from Cambridge University. She went on to appear in another film with Nicole, 1996’s
The Leading Man,
and, ironically, she did a love scene in 2000 with Tom Cruise in
Mission: Impossible
II.

The male lead in
Flirting
was played by Noah Taylor, who had originated the character in
The Year My Voice Broke.
The British-born actor went on to appear in nearly two dozen films, including
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
(2001) and
Vanilla Sky
(2001).

Flirting
begins at the boys’ school with a number of boys, including Danny, reporting to the headmaster’s office for a sound whipping. After the canning, Danny lies in bed and mulls over the complexities and absurdities of life, finally turning his thoughts to the girls’ school located across the lake. To Danny, with his suppressed sexuality, the two schools stare at each other across the water like “brooding volcanoes.”

When the scene switches to the girls’ school, Thandiwe, who is the only black student in the school, feigns sleep as a group of white girls gather around her and wonder aloud if the black girl with an African past  would be interested in a banana.

Danny, an awkward boy who sometimes stutters, is attracted to Thandiwe, who is the more aggressive of the two. As if to prove that, she breaks away from a dance to sneak into his dormitory. They sit on his bed to talk for a while, then she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. While she is gone, the other boys return from the dance, leaving Thandiwe trapped in the bathroom. Danny goes in to rescue her, but they both get trapped in a stall when several boys enter the room to shower.

Danny and Thandiwe soon become pen pals. When one of the other boys steals one of her letters and reads it to everyone, she is mortified. She blames Danny. When they put on a coed play, she chooses Nicola’s suitor as her partner. Nicola ends up with Danny, a development that does not please her.

One of the movie’s best scenes occurs when Nicola and Thandiwe come together as dance partners. As the dance teacher yells out instructions for the girls to look “sultry” and “smolder,” the two girls spar with eye contact. Nicole is magnificent with her body language and facial interactions. Finally, after peppering her foe with haughty body language, she gets to the point. “I think we should swap partners in the musical,” explains Nicola, who goes on to explain that Danny did not read the letter aloud—it was taken from him. Later that evening, Nicola catches Danny and Thandiwe kissing.

One night Danny and Thandiwe have a sexual encounter in which she relieves his tensions with her hand. When she returns to the dormitory, Nicole asks her if anything happened. Thandiwe, overcome with guilt, coughs and says, “I beg your pardon.”

 “No, it’s all right you don’t have to tell me. I think if I liked some boy enough, I’d want to.”

“Have you ever?”

“Of course, not.”

“Almost?”

“Well . .  . do you remember the young guy who was fixing the bell tower? I used to take him a cup of tea each morning before assembly. I rather liked him, although he never said anything much. I used to . . .  close my eyes and sit on a chair and let him touch me all over as long as he promised not to take anything off. I thought it was so exquisitely daring I’d almost faint. I’d have to sit down because I’d be trembling so much my legs would have given away. Afterward, I’d be reading a lesson convinced all the teachers must know because I was so shivery delicious all over.”

“I’m amazed,” says Thandiwe.

“So am I when I think of it, which is most of the time, especially at mass.”

Nicole offers up a toast. “Here’s to risks,” she says, bravely.

Nicole’s eyes danced the entire time she told the story about the boy in the bell tower. Her concept of on-screen sexuality had changed over the past couple of years; for the first time we are given a glimpse of a more mature actress, one who understands the nature of the connection between her brain and her vagina. If the truth is told, no one
talks
about sex better than Nicole Kidman; utilizing those skills, she would make an amazing dominatrix at a dead poets’ society.

The movie ends predictably enough, but not before Thandiwe is seen topless in bed with Danny, a surprise since the actress was only fifteen at the time.

Flirting
was not released in the United States until 1991. For the most part, reviewers were enthusiastic about the film. Wrote Roger Ebert for the
Chicago Sun Times:
“So often we settle for noise and movement from the movie screen, for stupid people indulging unworthy fantasies. Only rare movies like
Flirting
remind us that the movies are capable of providing us with the touch of other lives, that when all the conditions are right we can grow a little and learn a little, just like the people on the screen. This movie is joyous, wise and life-affirming, and certainly one of the year’s best films.”

Flirting
is a film to “make you believe in love again,” wrote Michael Morrison for the Edinburgh University Film Society. “It’s all been done before,” he wrote. “But this film is refreshingly original.
Flirting
is intelligent, witty, tender and beautifully understated.”

Hal Hinson, writing for the
Washington Post
, called the film “brilliant.” He praised one “touch and kiss” scene and wrote, “Every event has that urgent desperation of adolescent hyperbole when every sensation is a new one, and so the whole movie has this drunk-dizzy, head-over-heals quality.”

~ ~ ~

Australian filmmaker Phillip Noyce began making short films and documentaries as a teenager, but he was twenty-six before he made his first feature,
Backroads
(1977). He followed that up the following year with
Newsfront
, a film about the movie newsreel industry; that effort won him Australian awards for Best Film, Director, and Screenplay. For the next decade, he did a couple of feature films, but for the most part, he worked in television, most successfully on “The Hitchhiker.”

When he was chosen to be the director for
Dead Clam
, a thriller based on Charles Williams’s novel, he knew he had his hands on something special. Technically, it would be a challenge to film, he knew that, but that was the least of his problems. Since it was basically a three-person story—two men and a woman—everything would ride on casting. A mistake there would nullify even the best camera work and direction.

For the female lead, the role of Rae Ingram, Noyce and the producers considered a number of “name” actresses such as Debra Winger and Sigourney Weaver, but the more they discussed it among themselves, the more Nicole Kidman’s name came up. Her performance in “Vietnam” had affected Noyce greatly.

After watching the emotional radio scene in which Nicole carries six minutes of the action simply by virtue of her facial expressions, he was so moved by her performance that he wept. She had never attempted a role as complicated and as psychological demanding as the one required in
Dead Calm
, but he had no doubts about her ability to handle it, despite her youthful age.

Veteran actor Sam Neill, then forty years of age, was chosen to play opposite Nicole as Rae Ingram’s husband John Ingram. The Irish-born actor had made nearly twenty feature films, including
Omen III: The Final Conflict
and
The Good Wife
—and
appeared in about as many television series—so he was considered a safe choice.

When it came to the second male lead, the villainous role of Hughie Warriner, the
Dead Calm
brain trust decided to go with Billy Zane, another newcomer. The American-born Zane had appeared in only two feature films,
Critters
(1986) and
Back to the Future
(1985), but he had done several television shows, “The Case of the Hillside Stranglers” and “Police Story: Monster Manor,” that had demonstrated a propensity for creating offbeat characters. At twenty-one, dark and emotionally unpredictable, he would be an effective counter-point foil for Nicole.

As
Dead Calm
begins, Nicole’s character, Rae Ingram, is in an automobile accident that kills her young child. Disconsolate over the loss, she and her husband, John, take a long cruise so that they can be alone with each other. Three weeks at sea, they spot their first ship. Dead in the water, it appears to be deserted. As they stare at the schooner, they spot a man in a dingy rowing toward their ship. When he comes aboard, he tells them that his name is Hughie Warriner. There was a disaster aboard the schooner, he explains, and all five crew members died of food poisoning. To make matters worse, he insists that the schooner is sinking. All he wants is to get as far away as possible.

When Hughie goes to sleep, John rows over to check out the ship. What he discovers alarms him and he heads back to his ship, but before he can reach it Hughie knocks Rae unconscious and takes over the ship. John makes a desperate move to get aboard and, to his horror, he fails. As the ship sails away with Rae unconscious and Hughie at the wheel, John returns to the schooner and tries to get the ship operational again.