Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life (3 page)

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Nicole’s second movie role in 1983 was in
BMX Bandits
. She played the part of Judy, a young girl who gets involved, literally by accident, with a teenage bicycle “gang.” She first appears pushing a grocery cart at the store at which she works. Her first line in the movie is “Hi!” and it is delivered to a chubby male co-worker. She meets the bicycle gang when they accidentally crash into the grocery carts she is gathering. She gets fired as a result and tags along with the guys to see where that takes her.

 At five-foot-ten, sixteen-year-old Nicole has a luminous presence in the film. She was a good three and four inches taller than the boys, even taller than all the adults, with the exception of one or two men who were about her same height. For this role, in which the entire focus was on teens, she wore her kinky hair pulled up on top of her head in the same configuration that had garnered her so much trouble in high school.

In later years, Nicole often spoke of how awkward and ill at ease she felt as a teen. Those feelings are clearly evident in the film, where the gawky and flat-chested actress sometimes appears to think that her biggest challenge in life is simply to move her body from one place to another. She has said that she felt that she was “ugly” at that age, but clearly that was not the case, for she had a beautiful face that was filled with starry-eyed wonderment. The ugliness in her memories is probably due to the way she felt trying to make her body move with as much grace as her thoughts.

Shortly after she joins up with the bicycle gang, they discover a cache of hi-tech two-way radios that were meant to be picked up by bank robbers. They sell the radios, one at a time, to other teens with the hope that they will raise enough money for Nicole to purchase a bike of her own.

Soon it becomes apparent to the teens that the crooks—and a very bad gang of crooks they turn out to be—are hunting them down to recover the radios. They finally catch up with Nicole in a warehouse, where she tries to talk her way out of the situation, then fights her way to freedom. She is more physical in this movie than she was in
Bush Christmas
. She runs, rides a bike, fights off attackers—everything that your basic sixteen-year-old would do when chased by vicious killers. She is eventually captured again and kidnapped by the dimwitted crooks, an event that puts her in a position to be rescued by the entire Australian biker nation.

   Directed  by British-born Brian Trenchard-Smith, who previously had directed
Day of the Assassin
and
The Love Epidemic
,
BMX Bandits
—along with
Bush Christmas
—made Nicole an instant celebrity among Australia’s youth. She was very quickly signed up to do a series of television programs in 1984, including “Chase Through the Night (movie),” “Matthew and Son (movie),” “Five Mile Creek (series),” and “A Country Practice (series).”

“Five Mile Creek,” which required her to be in front of a camera five days a week for seven months, probably had the biggest impact on her personal development because it gave her the confidence to take chances and make mistakes without disastrous results.

When she emerged from her first year as an independent teenage, it was with a sense of confidence. At seventeen, she was famous in Australia, the wunderkind of her generation, and she had her own apartment and her own personal bank account. She also had a relationship with a thirty-seven-year-old man. Perhaps to flex her newfound independence, she undertook the first reckless adventure of her life: she left Australia and went to Amsterdam, Holland with her boyfriend.

When they arrived in Amsterdam, Nicole decided that she no longer knew how she felt about things (perhaps it was too much closeness on the long flight). “I said, ‘I really think we should just be friends,’” she told
Premiere
magazine. As can be imagined, that pronouncement did not go over too well with the boyfriend. Asked if her boyfriend went for the new arrangement, she said “No!” and then burst out laughing. “I naively did not understand male sexuality at that age.”

While in Amsterdam, Nicole went to a flea market and purchased an antique brocaded gown made in the 1930s. She thought it would make a beautiful wedding gown—and so it did several years later. “I thought I was going to marry the guy I was with-—and I didn’t. Thank God .  .  . ‘Cause I’m sure he says, ‘Thank God’ too. But I knew it was the dress for me.”

Chapter 2

NICOLE’S FIRST FLIRTATIONS

WITH MOVIE SUCCESS

For decades, Australia has nurtured the story of a legendary racehorse that traveled a long distance, under harsh conditions, to Melbourne to win the year’s biggest race—not once, but twice in consecutive years. With time, the horse became a mythic source of great national pride, so it was perhaps inevitable that someone would offer up a fictionalized account for a motion picture.

“This is a story that is part of Australian folklore, so I had known about it for a long time,” says director Denny Lawrence, who signed on to do the film
Archer
(later changed to
Archer’s Adventure
for release in the United States). “The idea of a horse walking such a long distance and then winning a race by such a margin (and doing it again the next year!) is of course appealing. Australia was a wild frontier still in those days—like the U.S.A.—with outlaws (bushrangers) and many natural obstacles to battle and overcome.”

 Lawrence, one of Australia’s most respected writers and directors—and a former chairman of the Australia Film Institute—says that the main challenge making the film was “slightly fictionalizing the account without betraying the historical fact—and still telling a good dramatic story within the parameters of ‘family viewing’ as well.”

As
Archer’s Adventure
begins. Dave, a stable boy played by Brett Climo, talks his employer into allowing him to take Archer on a five-hundred-mile trip to Melbourne to race in the Melbourne Cup. The countryside, while beautiful, is filled with natural dangers and human predators. Brett is robbed of his money on the first day out. On the second day, he comes across a farm, where he asks for food and lodging for himself and his horse, even though he no longer has the money to pay for it.

While at the farm, he meets a young girl named Catherine (played by Nicole), who is there to visit her uncle. They hit it off almost instantly and by nightfall they find themselves in a romantic setting.

“You can kiss me if you like,” says Nicole.

“Are you sure?” he answers, not believing what he heard.

Nicole turns away, no longer looking at him.

“No,” she says playfully. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Too late,” he says and kisses her.

The next morning they part company, although with an expectation that they will meet again. She tells him he would be welcome to visit her at her parents’ farm on the road to Melbourne. Before they meet again, Brett has an adventure with a married woman who is in the process of burying her child when he rides up to her farm. He builds a coffin for the child and digs the grave. Then he learns that her husband left home to make money for the family, even though the wife needed him more at the farm. Brett decides to look for the husband when he resumes his journey to Melbourne, so that he can tell the man about the death of his child and how much his wife needs him.

When Brett rides onto the farm owned by Nicole’s parents, everyone is in the middle of a wedding celebration. Nicole encourages him to put Archer in the barn so that he can dance with her. That night, a herd of wild horses spooks Archer into breaking free and joining the herd. With the help of Nicole’s parents, Brett locates Archer and resumes his journey to Melbourne.

The entire film was shot on location near Sydney—some of the wilderness locations are today bustling suburbs—but since it was done in the winter, the cast had to wear many different layers of clothing.

The film was beautifully photographed and the Australian scenery is often spectacular. “The landscape was integral to the story and an allegory as well as a reality,” explains Lawrence. “To go from temperate coastal regions through the mountains (with snow—very strange to the horses needless to say) across the tablelands and interior plains to the river flats of Melbourne, was an epic journey.”

Nicole did not have a large role in this film, but she was incredibly poised in every scene, becoming the focus even when that was unintended. Lawrence chose her for the role after viewing a sneak preview of
BMX Bandits
. “I thought she was terrifically exciting and charismatic,” he says. “I then met with her and found her modest and shy in person, with qualities that were essential to a young woman of those times. She was equally appealing to a modern audience I felt; the character required a bit of ‘sass.’ She was also tremendously photogenic.”

Lawrence was not certain what to expect from her once filming began. “She was very open and easy to direct and work with, but already had confidence and good craft skills which made it easy to get good outcomes,” he explains. “She was a thorough professional from the word go.”

The only scenes that gave her a hard time, he says, were those in which she had to ride a horse and wear long frocks and petticoats. “Like a lot of actors, she was quiet and serious about her work and because she was a little shy I was slightly concerned that she might baulk at the ‘kissing’ scene, but, as at all other times, she was proficiently ‘in the moment’ and so suddenly ‘bold’ that it threw Brett a bit, which was perfect for the scene. I had wondered about whether there was enough ‘justification’ for this little plot element, but by the time we finished the film we all wished we’d had more of Nicole in there—and the audiences loved her, of course.”

Actually, it wasn’t the actors that gave Lawrence a difficult time during the filming. “Horses are especially flighty and sensitive, even with the best training,” he says. “And such thoroughbreds tire easily and get bored and have to be protected. Also, like all of us, they are better at some things than others.”

Actually, there were three “Archers” in the film, he says—the main one and a couple of doubles that were used for different tasks such as running, jumping or crossing rivers. “One funny note is that the lead actor, Bret, was allergic to horses.”

~ ~ ~

Nicole’s next movie was
Wills & Burke
, a comedy directed by Bob Weis. It must have been a real clunker because no one in Australia today will discuss it and it cannot be purchased on videocassette in the United States. It has literally vanished from public sight. All actors have movies in their past that they would like to pretend never happened, and for Nicole that movie would appear to be
Wills & Burke
.

As sometimes happens in the movie business, Nicole went from that experience to one that would radically change her life. She was signed for the lead role in the television miniseries
Vietnam
, a drama that recreated the passions that had so inflamed the country, including her own parents, in the 1960s and early 1970s
.
She was given the role of Megan, a young woman who sees her life profoundly affected by the war. Also co-starring in the series was Brett Climo, who had worked with Nicole in
Archer’s Adventure
, and Alyssa-Jane Cook, who went on to become one of Australia’s most respected actresses and television personalities.

When the story begins, Megan is fourteen, an awkward schoolgirl who seems unaffected by the war, but, when it ends, she is twenty-four and very much involved in bringing the war to an end. For Nicole, playing the role was a challenge that required her, for the first time in her life, to do outside research on a character.

“It really made a big difference to me to work with a three-dimensional character and flesh out the comic and dramatic aspects of the role,” Nicole told
Cosmopolitan
magazine. “I became obsessive about acting. I did all sorts of research about the mores and culture of the Sixties. I wasn’t even born yet when the Beatles became popular, so I had to sit down and study life in the Sixties, as if for a term paper.”

 The highlight of the series occurred when Megan, by then a vociferous opponent of conscription, was a guest on a radio call-in show. As she participated in the listener discussions about the war and the draft, a Vietnam veteran called in to express his opinions. Megan recognized the voice: It was her estranged brother, whom she had not seen or talked to in a long time. The point from which she recognizes the voice and then breaks down in tears lasts for six minutes.

It was a masterful scene that required Nicole to express an array of emotions, using only her face; beautifully done, it was accomplished in one take and established Nicole as an actress to be reckoned with. When the miniseries aired, Australians reacted very emotionally to the scene and quickly elevated Nicole to star status. The Australian Film Institute responded by presenting her with an award—her first—for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Television Drama.”

~ ~ ~

 After the success of
Vietnam
, Nicole showed up for work in Perth for her next project overflowing with enthusiasm and optimism.
Windrider
, directed by veteran Australian cinematographer Vincent Monton, was a windsurfing movie directed toward the youth market. Nicole signed on to play the roll of Jade, a rock singer who falls for a wind surfer (Tom Burlinson) who works at his father’s engineering firm.

Burlinson, who was thirty when filming began, was born in Toronto, Canada to British-born parents, who subsequently moved to New Jersey, then back to England, then on to Australia, where the parents divorced and Burlinson remained with his father. After doing television in his early twenties, he got his big break in 1981 when he was cast as Jim Craig in
The Man From Snowy River,
starring Kirk Douglas. He had made two additional movies by the time he signed on for
Windrider
, but, for some reason, his career had cooled considerably by then.

Windrider
begins with Nicole watching Burlinson do a 360-degree turn on a windsurfing board. There is almost no plot development in this movie and Nicole has very few good lines. Mostly, she stands around looking pretty, saying things like “What are you doing, mate?” She still has a deep Australian accent at this point in her career and she plays that up, sometimes looking like a caricature of an Aussie punk rocker on the make. She does no singing in the film, but she does lip-sync to the music.

The most notable thing about this movie is that eighteen-year-old Nicole does her first nude scene, ever. It occurs with Burlison in a shower, where she is covered with soap lather. Subsequently, she does other nude scenes in which she displays her still-developing breasts (an A-cup would seem excessive coverage) and barely legal buttocks, clearly her best physical asset at that point in her life.

Probably not until the movie was released did Nicole know she had made a mistake. Reviews were typical of the one written by Desmond Ryan for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
: “
Windrider
, an Australian production that proves that Hollywood has no monopoly on airhead entertainment, doesn’t have much more content than the average balloon .  .  . [it] would have done everyone a favor by forgetting its silly plot and following the wave created by
The Endless Summer.
In this case, facts would make a stronger movie than fiction.”

Nicole’s judgment in making the film may have been impaired after shooting began because she began dating her co-star, Tom Burlinson. It was the first big romance of her life and lasted for nearly three years. She was enthusiastic about the romance and transferred that enthusiasm to a film that was not worthy of her passion.

Windrider
ended up becoming a turning point in Burlinson’s career. He made only four feature films after that, and although he worked in several Australian television series, he put less emphasis on acting as the years went by (he has not made a movie in over ten years) to focus on his singing career. He has a singing voice that is remarkably similar to that of Frank Sinatra—he was chosen to be the voice of the “young” Sinatra in the American miniseries produced by Tina Sinatra—and he has made a nice living in Australia in the early 2000s with a stage show he created, “The Sinatra Story in Song.”

~ ~ ~

In an 1989 interview with
Rolling Stone
, Nicole was philosophical about both Burlinson and the movie: “I accepted roles when I was younger, which I don’t regret, because on everything I’ve done I’ve learnt something or I’ve met someone who’s been quite instrumental in molding my career. On
Windrider
, I met someone that  . . . was really important to me and helped me to grow. So you’ve got to look at things positively. I did do some thing that weren’t of really high quality, but I learnt a lot.”

 The relationship with Burlinson ended in 1988 when he asked her to marry him and she said no. Shortly after her breakup with Burlinson, she began dating actor Marcus Graham. Four years older than Nicole, the Perth-born actor had made only one film at that point,
Dangerous Game,
but he would go on to make numerous movies, including 2001’s
Mulholland Dr.
and 2002’s
Horseplay.
For Nicole, the relationship was different from the one she enjoyed with Burlinson. Although she had lived with Burlinson and set up housekeeping, she chose to live separately from Graham during their romance, citing career needs and a wish for more personal space.