FEARLESS

Scores of movies, heaps of awards, and a parade of unforgettable fashion moments. But Nicole Kidman is as voracious as ever: more risk, more everything. “Why stop?”

- Wendell Steavenson

WINGING IT Kidman will star in Practical Magic 2 opposite Sandra Bullock next year. Maison Margiela Artisanal 2025 dress. Cartier High Jewelry earrings. Fashion Editor: Malina Joseph Gilchrist.

When I first talked to Nicole Kidman in London in late August, we met in a curtained alcove of a blandly grand hotel restaurant in Mayfair. Decanted from a transatlantic flight—she had gone home to Nashville to settle her two teenage daughters, Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 14, into a new school year before returning here to finish filming Practical Magic 2 with Sandra Bullock—she shimmered in a white silk jacquard sundress and gold ballerina slippers. Her strawberry blond hair was drawn back into an elegant ponytail, and on one finger flashed an emerald-cut diamond: spectacular, spectacular, as big as the Ritz.

Kidman was eloquent and warm, leavening her more introspective thoughts with a twinkly laugh. By way of introduction, I mentioned that I often wrote about people in war, and she leaned forward to tell me that when she first took up her role as a UN ambassador in 2006, she had to be taught how to listen to the stories of women in Kosovo, many of whom had suffered sexual violence, because “I would absorb them to the point where I couldn't even function...sensorily, emotionally.” As we went on to discuss trauma and suffering and telling stories, we fell into frank and easy conversation. Ten minutes flew by before I remembered I was supposed to be conducting an interview.

Kidman’s movie-star exterior is shiny, implacable, flawless, but inside is the soft stuff: intuitive, porous, sensitive. She often used the word open in describing herself. Her acting seems to meld the persona and the personal—a photogenic clarity and stillness that draws on a deep well of human emotion. Kidman said that Anthony Minghella, who directed her in the 2003 film