Nicole Kidman Tells It Like It Is
By Meryl Gordon
Photo Credit: James White
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She gives a teasing laugh, so I can't resist asking whether it's true that they are hoping to have a baby together. "I'd call you if I was pregnant," she quips. "We can do a satellite link to me." Her friend songwriter Carole Bayer Sager confirms, "She wants to have a baby with Keith. I hope that happens."
Kidman is especially sensitive about this topic because of a recent story in Vanity Fair that garnered international headlines for the revelation that she lost a baby at age 23 while married to Cruise. "It was wrongly reported," she says, by everyone who picked up the story, claiming she'd had a miscarriage, when what she'd had was an ectopic pregnancy. "So it's huge news, and it didn't happen. I had a miscarriage at the end of my marriage, but I had an ectopic pregnancy at the beginning of my marriage. It was incredibly traumatic for me. Sometimes you share your grief." Kidman is hopeful that things will work next time, saying simply, "What will be will be. It's in God's hands."
Over the course of her career, Kidman has immersed herself in a wild array of characters. Like any savvy actress with options, she alternates between big-budget studio movies and quirky quality indies. She currently has two movies out that demonstrate her versatility: Margot at the Wedding, a fractured-family ensemble directed by Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) in which she plays a woman squabbling with her sister, and The Golden Compass, based on the best-selling children's book, where she's the baddie.
"If Nicole feels safe, she'll give everything," says Baumbach. "I just stood back and let her go." Her character in Margot literally finds herself up a tree at one point during the film, unable to get down. "There was so much anxiety about the tree," he says. "People thought maybe we should use a double. Not only did she get up there, but she sat up there all day."
