10. The Hours (2002)
This was the performance that earned Nicole Kidman her Oscar for best actress – playing Virginia Woolf in an agonised spiritual state, somewhere between paralysis and a trance, grappling with the possibilities of fiction and her own depression. It is a good, if somewhat overrated performance, with Kidman playing to her queenly, statuesque qualities, but not quite tapping into the inner fire of her better performances. For some reason, she had to play the part with a silly prosthetic nose that made her look like Big Bird.
9. Destroyer (2018)
Opinions are divided on this most conspicuous of Kidman’s castings-against-type (I prefer The Paperboy in this vein), but she brings a tough, stolid, plausible presence to her uglied-up role as the undercover cop, physically and psychologically scarred by her experiences embedded in a robbery crew. Years after the events that brutalised her, she becomes convinced that she can finally take down the culprit; her bitterness and anguish are forcefully portrayed.
8. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Kidman had the distinction of working with Stanley Kubrick on his final film: hers is an intelligent and well-judged contribution to a minor, but interesting and overpoweringly atmospheric film, an adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story, updated to late-20th-century New York. Kidman plays the wife of Tom Cruise’s sexually tortured high-society doctor and she is frank and open about sexuality in a way that he is not. It is she who will keep this film from sliding down the posterity rankings.
7. The Paperboy (2012)
No film and no performance of Kidman’s has been more misunderstood on first release. She was cast against type in this brash, uproarious Florida noir, giving a cracking performance as Charlotte Bless, the needy, dysfunctional peroxide blonde who starts up a pen-pal romance with a killer on death row. Kidman has some truly outrageous scenes, sending up her own image and getting stuck into every luridly horrible moment. Terrific stuff.
6. Dogville (2003)
Kidman’s aura of sophisticated mystery and desire is perfect for this daring experiment in filmed theatre from master auteur/prankster Lars von Trier. She plays Grace, a woman apparently on the run from criminals, who is taken in by the uptight provincial folk of Dogville, Colorado, and becomes the focus of their obsessively repressed moralism and desire. Without Kidman, this would be nothing.
5. Dead Calm (1989)
Kidman had her breakthrough with this terrific suspense thriller that has something of Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski. She and Sam Neill play a couple alone on a yacht, who encounter a disturbing young man (Billy Zane) who begs to come aboard. This is Kidman in her early, frizzy-haired incarnation, a more natural, earthy performance than any she has since been known for, but this is great stuff as her character, left all alone, has to outwit and outmanoeuvre the creepy stranger.
4. The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
This is Kidman in rarefied form. Director Jane Campion creates for her, or from her, a shimmering haze of mystery in this adaptation of Henry James’s novel in which she plays the beautiful American Isabel Archer who finds herself attracted to John Malkovich’s louche and cynical artist. For many, the exquisiteness of her appearance here makes it peak Kidman. She goes into her distinctive trance, which also mesmerises the audience.
3. To Die For (1995)
This was the key early role for Kidman, a barnstorming lead turn in which, interestingly, it was director Gus Van Sant who divined that her star quality lay not in ordinariness, but in something more fabricated and unearthly. She is the sinister and ruthless weather presenter on local cable TV who is desperate to become a star at all costs. Nowadays, she would be an Instagram influencer.
2. Birth (2004)
This is a film that grows with each rewatching and no one but Kidman could have carried it off with such dignity and flair. She plays Anna, a beautiful, wealthy Manhattan widow who is astonished when a 10-year-old boy walks into her life and announces he is the reincarnation of her dead husband. And he does this, citing details that only her late husband could possibly know. The single, extended shot of Kidman’s stricken face as we and she realise that she now believes it, is incredible, and so is her scene with the boy when they discuss how they will marry, or remarry, in 10 or so years, when he comes of age.
1. The Others (2001)
This is the perfect Kidman film, a ghost story in the style of Henry James that, more than any other, elicits her almost spiritual aura of beauty and mystery with its occult trace of sexiness. In this movie, she is part Grace Kelly, part Deborah Kerr, with a touch of Kathleen Byron. (I should also say she was once cast as Grace Kelly in the terrible Grace of Monaco, which managed to misunderstand both Kelly and Kidman). Here, she plays the statuesque chatelaine of a grand but oppressively gloomy country house. Her husband has gone off to fight in the second world war, leaving her to deal with the children and what few servants they can afford. They are terrified by what appear to be ghosts. Kidman’s beautiful face, lit by candlelight, seems in this film to have been painted by John Everett Millais. She has a sheen of tragedy, and a kind of eroticised but refined victimhood. This is classic Kidman.
