Product Description

From the brilliant film historian and critic David Thomson, a book that reinvents the star biography in a singularly illuminating portrait of Nicole Kidman—and what it means to be a top actress today. At once life story, love letter, and critical analysis, this is not merely a book about who Kidman is but about what she is—in our culture and in our minds, on- and offscreen.

Tall, Australian, one of the striking beauties of the world, Nicole Kidman is that rare modern phenomenon—an authentic movie star who is as happy and as creative throwing a seductive gaze from some magazine cover as she is being Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Here is the story of how this actress began her career, has grown through her roles, taken risks, made good choices and bad, and worried about money, aging, and image.

Here are the details of an actress’s life: her performances in To Die For, The Portrait of a Lady, Eyes Wide Shut, Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, and Birth, among other films; her high-visibility marriage to Tom Cruise; her intense working relationship with Stanley Kubrick and her collaborations with Anthony Minghella and Baz Luhrmann; her work with Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Renée Zellweger, and John Malkovich; her decisions concerning nudity, endorsements, and publicity.

And here are Thomson’s scintillating considerations of what celebrity means in the life of an actress like Kidman; of how the screen becomes both barrier and open sesame for her and for her audience; of what is required today of an actress of Kidman’s stature if she is to remain vital to the industry and to the audiences who made her a prime celebrity.

Impassioned, opinionated, dazzlingly original in its approach and ideas, Nicole Kidman is as alluring and as much fun as Nicole Kidman herself, and David Thomson’s most remarkable book yet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #887281 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-08
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Thomson's love letter to Kidman is less a biography than a long and winding meditation on moviemaking and starmaking. Thomson attempts to chronicle the actress's personal life based on her statements to the media, her choice of roles and an interview with her, but the bulk of this account consists of his inferences and analysis, including the observation that actors project what they expect we, the public, want them to be. His angle on Kidman is a question: is she sincere in her actions and true to herself? The real question is, how much do we care? Following absorbing sections about her youth in Australia and beginnings as a talented newcomer in Hollywood, Thomson (The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood) constructs a time line of Kidman's movies, giving near-equal weight to her breakthrough in To Die For and her Oscar-winning role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours as to a string of duds (Birth, The Stepford Wives, The Interpreter). For Thomson, the failures offer fertile—or, sometimes for the reader, tiresome—opportunities to reimagine casting, directing and story. Omnivorous movie buffs might appreciate Thomson's take on Hollywood, but US Weekly readers won't have the stamina for his blend of star worship and criticism. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Thomson's bizarre paean to his favorite actress is ostensibly a meticulous study of an actress's career adumbrated by meditations on the nature of stardom. He analyzes the art films that test Kidman's dramatic powers and the commercial dross that pays the servants, and which he clearly feels is unworthy of her. A true obsessive, Thomson seems to have logged every detail of Kidman's public life; of an appearance in In Style, we learn that "on pages 332-33 . . . she is stretched out on a pink sofa." Ultimately, though, we hear much more about Thomson. In addition to his views on Kidman—her marriage, her boyfriends, "the curve of her bottom," and her forehead, which he hopes is not botoxed—he tells us about such matters as the time he met Katharine Hepburn and a play he once directed. What begins as an analysis of stardom ends up as a case study of fandom.
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From The Washington Post
Not long ago, someone asked me that old chestnut about which book I'd take to a desert island. I was expected to say, oh, Middlemarch or Middle Earth or Khalil Gibran. I answered David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film -- on the grounds that it was the least exhaustible book I could think of. And if a fellow has to wake up every morning under the same coconut tree, he could find worse company than Jean Arthur and Howard Hawks and Kenji Mizoguchi and Cary Grant. If you can't smuggle Margaret Sullavan onto your desert island, then meditating on her is the next best thing.

Consider this, too. The essays in Thomson's dictionary -- wide-angled and fine-grained, lyrically intuitive and closely reasoned -- are more than viewing aids, they are parallel artworks. And, best of all for the desert-island reader, they come robed in melancholy, for Thomson understands at some level that he is chronicling cinema's decline and fall -- and, of course, his own. Each critic is killed by the thing he loves.

Those who share that love find themselves in the backward position of wishing that today's movies and movie stars could be worthy of their greatest critics. Nothing in "The Da Vinci Code" was as dismaying as watching New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane empty his quiver into it. And nothing speaks so strongly to our diminished field of play as seeing David Thomson hash out an entire book on the subject of Nicole Kidman (after already devoting a chapter to her in The Whole Equation). It smacks of disproportion, unseemliness: Professor Rath burying his nose in Lola Lola's garter. The mind quickly glides toward worthier obsessions, toward Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Julianne Moore, even Charlize Theron. But Thomson isn't budging. It's Nicole or nothing. "I don't say she's the greatest actress ever, or even the best of her time," he says, only "the bravest, the most adventurous, and the most varied of her time."

Ardor, at least, hasn't swamped his critical faculty. He sifts through Kidman's catalogue with persistence and jagged bolts of insight. Nobody sees things quite the way David Thomson does. Suzanne, the homicidal anti-heroine of "To Die For" (still Kidman's best performance) "is photographed like an advertisement for ripe fruit," with "an excess of light the way carefully concealed banks of light fall on the produce in a supermarket." Satine, the doomed showgirl of "Moulin Rouge," descends "on a strawberry red umbilical cord . . . strutting her long white thighs as if they were the hands on life's clock."

Thomson is particularly fine in shaking out the gold and dross from "The Hours," which he regards less as a paean to Virginia Woolf than as "a kind of tribute to the tradition or example set down by Meryl Streep." As for Kidman's Oscar-winning performance, he is both admiring and skeptical. "This Mrs. Woolf," he writes, "is too fierce and strong to go into the river. . . . [She] might have proved a sturdy figure in some resistance movement, tender in sensibility yet prepared to learn how to break a Nazi neck."

There is, yes, a vein of disappointment in Thomson's mash note, the sense of a field running gently fallow. As the years pass and the betrayals mount -- "The Stepford Wives," "The Interpreter," the Kabuki spectacle of Botox-Kidman rising up at awards-show podiums -- you can feel Thomson kneading his scalp at each misstep. Did she have to pose for that In Style cover? Did she have to whore herself out to Chanel No. 5? For the love of God, did she have to make "Bewitched"?

Chivalrously, he tries to attribute Kidman's erratic progress to phenomena outside her control: The problem of being a woman in a male-dominated industry, let's say, or the "total and uncomplaining addiction to being someone else" that eventually cripples every actor. He wants Kidman, in short, to be the alabaster emblem of the cinema's own contradictions, but the more he plumps for her larger relevance, the more he reinforces how private his obsession really is.

Which is undoubtedly all obsession can ever be. In a revealing moment, Kidman even invades Thomson's dreams, dressed as the Catherine Deneuve prostitute from "Belle de Jour" and pleasuring a Gestapo officer and an "elderly Chinaman." Thomson awakes, refreshed, and pours himself a cup of tea. "Then my wife came in. We greeted each other quite fondly. She wondered what I might like for dinner. I gave the matter every thought and I was about to answer. Then she yawned and said how tiring her afternoons were these days. Perhaps she'd let herself have a nap before dinner, if I didn't mind waiting. She took off her earrings and was asleep before I could reply."

An oddly poignant set piece: slumbering spouses and phantom love affairs. It made me wonder whom his wife was dreaming of. And it left me rooting for David Thomson to stay awake.

Reviewed by Louis Bayard
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

A "biography" that should be an embarassment to the author
This book is not so much a biography (let alone an authorized biography) as it is a trite apologetic for the author's own obsession with Nicole Kidman. Thompson offers an armchair deconstruction of film and film-making in an effort to lend his book some semblance of critical purpose. His conclusion however, (all movie actors are hollow shells of human beings with whom we interact in a mutual desire to fill some assumed void; movies are only viewed as an extension of star-worship) generalizes his own neurosis and obsessions to his readers. These kinds of sweeping generalizations permeate the text (all Australian's are driven by rage??) and would not pass muster in a college freshman writing course.

Thompson's chummy style, implicating the reader in his own onanistic obsession, is grotesque. Personally, I do not surf the web looking for nude and semi-nude pictures of Ms. Kidman, nor do I share Thompson's morbid fantasies of her waking up "screaming" at the realization that she is aging. This falls firmly under the category of "too much information" and should give the reader a clue as to the proprietary and even sadistic bent of Thompson's attachment to and fascination with the actress.

Ultimately, Thompson's argument that Ms. Kidman shamelessly courts the limelight begging to be worshiped in an effort to "be" what we desire speaks more truth about Thompson's own need to justify his voyeuristic impulses than it does about Ms. Kidman's attitude towards privacy and public notice. It brings to mind the kind of defense offered at rape trials that the girl was "asking for it" because she had on too much makeup. And the rape analogy can be taken farther. The availability of coverage of her personal life is primarily the product of those industries secondary to the film industry - the tabloids, entertainment broadcasts and yes, critics, who obtain their own celebrity and make their living by marketing the image of others. In so doing, they take something as essential to a human being as their identity out of their hands, craft or even reinvent it and sell it like a comodity for their own gain.

Thompson exemplifies the worst of this parasitic behavior, reducing Nicole Kidman to the shell of a public persona crafted largely by others, and presuming to therefore "know" her, all the while blaming her for the shallowness of that image. Worse yet, in a volume that bears Ms. Kidman's name and likeness on the cover, Thompson uses this "biography" to showcase his own obsession and his own fantasy-driven "insights" into popular culture and film. A book like this, nothing more than fantasy-rendered-as-biography, can only be regarded as an act of violence against its very subject.

disappointment
Most people buy biographies because they have an existing interest in that star and want to get more of an insight into that particular personality. This book provides absolutely no new revelations into this talented actress. Instead we are forced to be the audience to David's views on each and every film and how he feels she could have done better/worse etc. There are very few interviews with people that have worked with her, few details about why she made her films choices, how the films were put together, and how she has become such a bankable star. He quotes from other magazine and interviews she has done, which we all have access to, and talks like he knows her intimately even though it is revealed they only spoke for a few minutes on the phone. I understand this was an unauthorised biog, but surely there could have been some proper investagative journalism and research done to provide the reader with new information on Nicole, instead of boring us with his own theories. Shame on you David! We bought this book to learn more about Nicole not about you.

BOTH INTRIGUING AND SCHOLARLY

It's always difficult to write a current bio of a famous personality as there seems to be breaking news on an almost daily basis. Case in point - the arresting bio of Nicole Kidman by David Thomson. The world recently learned that the mega star and husband Keith Urban are expecting their first child. That may be the only detail overlooked in this in depth study, and that omission was only due to time constraints.

Thomson who has taught film studies at Dartmouth College and is on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival is an astute observer of cinema and all its ramifications. Thus, he brings an added dimension to this particular book in which he explores the influence of film on the observers, saying "....acting and being at the movies are mirror images." So, while his book is most definitely about acting and Nicole Kidman, it is also about "what happens to anyone beholding an actress."

Before launching into a description of Kidman's life and films, the author describes how he sees the actress today. Noting that there are thousands upon thousands of hits on the mouse every day from those who want to know more about Kidman, he says that she has lived up to the celebrity demand of being on public display whether she is posing for upscale perfume ads, sitting for countless glossy covers, or dropping " her clothes if only to air out that elegant Australian body." In later years he envisions her as being rather like Katharine Hepburn, a proud older woman, a mistress of her craft.

Meanwhile, Kidman is in her prime and Thomson takes an expansive look at her films to date beginning with a TV movie for children in 1983 to Birth, The Stepford Wives and The Interpreter, which he calls "three duds in a row" - a fate to be avoided at all costs. Nonetheless, she prevails.

Thomson's book is both intriguing and a scholarly analysis - it is always fascinating.

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke