Finally, in Lion, Nicole Kidman Gets to Nurture Onscreen

Finally, in Lion, she gets to nurture.

- Kyle Buchanan

NICOLE KIDMAN’S young children recently watched Paddington, in which she stars as a murderous taxidermist bent on stuffing the titular bear, and they had some notes. “They were like, ‘Why were you playing the baddie?’ ” she says, laughing. Curled up in a West Hollywood hotel room, Kidman has slipped her feet out of their expensive heels and tucked them under her legs on the couch. “They wanted me to play the bear’s mother. I was like, ‘I didn’t get offered the bear’s mother.’ ” What she means is: because the bear’s mother is a good adoptive mother. The 49-year-old Kidman, who won an Oscar for playing the childless writer Virginia Woolf, will readily admit that she’s not the first pick for most loving-mom roles. The archetype she has seemingly settled into in mid-career is quite the opposite: a woman either terrorizing or grieving for children, which is an especially striking (and poignant) development for a woman who went through a painful separation from the children she adopted with Tom Cruise (she has since reunited with them, and raises her two younger children with husband Keith Urban). The pattern, which began perhaps with The Others, shows up even in films primarily for children, like Paddington and The Golden Compass, in which Kidman’s alabaster hauteur is used to terrify. The rest of her filmography is studded with screen children who don’t survive or, in Margot at the Wedding and Stoker, must bear the brunt of her vituperative monologues if they do make it.