Love in a cold climate

Steve Pratt meets the Oscar-winning actress whose latest film is also tipped for awards success.

Nicole Kidman must be tougher than she looks. Her pale complexion and thin frame, which even a horizontally-striped dress can't make look anything but pencil-thin, give the impression of a fragile china doll. Beneath the delicate exterior is a steely determination that's earned her the label of "the most powerful woman in Hollywood".

This is all the more surprising as she doesn't have a list of blockbuster movies to her credit. What she has is a versatility and willingness to experiment in screen roles lacking in most other actresses of her age and position.

She has, as someone pointed out, both class and clout. She can act, she looks good and has successfully overcome being one half of the most famous celebrity couple in the world. Since her marriage to Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise ended, her career has blossomed. The idea of simply referring to her as the ex-Mrs Cruise is redundant.

Entertainment Weekly made her the cover girl on its issue naming The 101 Most Powerful People In Show Business although she only came in at number ten. Kidman, the US magazine declared, represented the new criterion for the Hollywood package - "the glamour girl artist, sexy and respected".

She's the leading lady of choice among studio executives. Success has not come easily to the Honolulu-born, Sydney-raised actress. Back in 1996 critics were applauding her turn as an ambitious TV weathergirl in To Die For and predicting great things. Only now has the 36-year-old come into her own through movies such as Moulin Rouge, The Others and The Hours.

The latter won her a best actress Oscar for her portrayal, complete with false nose, of writer Virginia Woolf. Her London stage debut in The Blue Room aroused much attention too, not least because she took off all her clothes.

She shows an appetite for work unlike most actresses, with six films due to reach cinema screens over the next two years. Cold Mountain, The Human Stain and Dogville open within three months of each other in early 2004.

The first - an adaptation of Charles Frazier's award-winning novel set during the American Civil War - is the reason for her presence in London, a stop-off in a procession of red carpet premiere appearances around the world.

For such a powerful Hollywood player, the 36-year-old comes with remarkably little baggage. She doesn't behave like the star she is. She's not late for the interview, doesn't stipulate "no personal questions" as a condition of talking, and doesn't flee, flanked by minders, the minute the formal part of the chat is over.

She did need protection while filming Cold Mountain in Romania. Not from paparazzi or stalkers but the wildlife. "The thing that was amazing shooting there was that it was so different, even in terms of taking a walk," she explains.

"The first morning I was there I got up at 6am and decided to take a walk to help me get over my jet lag. I went down into the forest and said I didn't need anyone with me, I'd be fine. And there was this huge pack of wild dogs there. I came running back.

"There were a lot of wild animals around. We saw bears. On the Saturday night would be this weekly bear spotting. You'd drive to work and there'd be sheep around. It was a remote mountain town."

You can see why writer-director Anthony Minghella - an Oscar-winner for The English Patient - chose Kidman to play the minister's daughter who inspires Jude Law's Confederate soldier Inman to fight his way home to the woman he loves. She's the sort of woman most men would go through hell and high water to be reunited with.

While the men are away at war, her character Ada tends the land in the remote location where farms and town were constructed by the movie-makers. "We were shooting in a house built for the film, and there was something so simple about it that you could see the way people existed there," she recalls.

"The way Ada learns to take care of herself - of course I could eventually learn to do that."

For her, that was one of the film's attractions - the scenes where drifter Ruby (Renee Zellwegger) teaches Ada to survive on the land. "I felt that the two of us, up a mountain together, would be kind of fun. She's just great to be around and we spent a lot of time together, about three months, so we really got to know each other," says Kidman.

"And being the same age as actresses, basically in the same position, and with her having Chicago and me having The Hours coming out just when we finished making the film. So it was really strange timing of us coming together, and being able to share and help each other. I hope you see that friendship in the movie, it's something that I'm really proud of."

She calls Cold Mountain her balancing role after traumatic parts in Dogville and The Human Stain. "This was something I needed to do because it was about belief in someone," she says.

"I felt Ada was not damaged, she still has this beautiful innocence to her. When somebody says he'll come back, she believes he will. Something like Dogville is a lot different, and it certainly stays with you. Each role takes a little from you and circles around you for the rest of your life. I don't ever think you abandon any of them."

This isn't the attitude of most Hollywood actresses, but then she never has been like most Hollywood actresses. Her choices have rarely inclined towards the obviously-commercial. She's as adept at selecting roles totally different to the last one as Meryl Streep is at doing accents.

Ada requires Kidman to adopt a Charleston accent. Author Frazier gave it the thumbs up "which is all I care about", she says. "He visited the set quite early on in production. He's spent six years writing this book so the idea of meeting the author and knowing that you're portraying something that existed in their head for that amount of time is very intimidating.

"To actually meet somebody and be playing a person who didn't exist except to them was difficult. But he was very generous to us."

One thing that Kidman has difficulty doing is looking dowdy. In Cold Mountain, Ada wears her father's old clothes rather than the crinolines and corsets of the early part of the story. Minghella, who's sitting next to Kidman at the interview, says: "The infuriating thing for a film-maker is that whatever you do to her, she looks beautiful.

"After her father dies, she's wearing the remnants of her own clothes plus all of his clothes. As soon as she put them on, they looked like she'd just come out of Prada. It was absurd and frustrating."

His leading lady looks suitably humble. "That's brutal," she says. "But the costumes and that veil really fed into the character. I felt like this really strange, exotic bird. We were in the real corsets, the real boots which are slippery and tiny and not easy to walk in.

"When Renee was running me around the mountain, I was trying desperately to keep up with her because all of my things changed the way I moved. There was a huge emphasis on their hair, the size of their waist, the embroidery on their gloves, all of those things were very important."

After the emotional turmoil of her last few movies, filming something lighter was a welcome relief. She's just finished a remake of The Stepford Wives "And we hope that's a comedy," she says.

"Scott Rudin, who produced The Hours, saw me as Virginia Woolf and told me I needed to go to summer camp. He gave me Stepford Wives. But I'll tell you, comedy is a lot harder. I was exhausted when I finished that, I'm on holiday now."

Cold Mountain (15) opens in cinemas on Boxing Day.