Grace in Dogville is a classic Kidman part – an enigmatic stranger who becomes a town slave, masochistically adapting and suffering for people’s collective needs.I’ve yet to meet a single person who’s worked with Kidman who has a bad word to say about her. She’s now one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actress (allegedly making in the region of $17.5m for mainstream movies like the upcoming Bewitched and about the same for her recent flop The Stepford Wives). She is, officially, Australia’s richest woman under 40.On the other hand, despite the mainstream paycheck movies like Stepford and Batman Forever, she’s won plenty of kudos and respect for doing risky, small-scale projects (with small-scale pay packets), starting with Gus Van Sant’s ruthlessly black comedy To Die For, and startling doubters with her interior Isabel Archer in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady. (Scheduling conflicts meant she had to back out of playing the lead role in Campion’s In the Cut, a part later taken by Meg Ryan, though Kidman still has a producer’s credit on the movie.) Lars von Trier’s Dogville, with its bare-bones set and shocking content, took Kidman even further out on a limb. “Unless I write it and direct it myself, I’m in a film because I want to be there and portray a character authentically and truthfully. But it’s not my creation in terms of the written word or the way in which it’s filmed. I’m almost there as a conduit, and to augment, hopefully, and bring something to life But it’s not my point of view.

So, as Nicole, what does it matter what I think?”Meet Nicole Kidman, Miss tabula rasa. At her best, for example in Birth, Kidman dissolves into a role. Strikingly good looking and anonymous at the same time, there is a blank, glassy quality about her which makes it easier for us to project onto her our desires. At one point in Birth, the camera tracks in on her face in a theatre and holds it for two and a half minutes, just drinking in the flickering weather of her face, even though she’s hardly moving a muscle. It’s less acting and more conjuring.Maybe it’s this slipperiness, this refusal to be pinned down, that gets people’s backs up: there’s something about Kidman that breeds resentment from those who’ve never met her, and fierce loyalty from those who have. On the one hand, there were snide comments, when she took home the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Hours, about her “winning by a nose.” She no doubt married Tom Cruise for love, but the match worked both for her career and against it, prompting unfair accusations of nepotism to account for her rapid rise to the top, although she’s held the position with ease since they divorced in 2001. The set-up might seem rather strange, but Kidman’s quiet, poised performance makes it entirely convincing.
The story is almost a fairy tale, but is played out in realistic Upper West Side drawing rooms, with all the trappings of modern wealth.

Can Kidman imagine something like this happening in real life? “It doesn’t matter what I think,” she says with insistence. A Latin-American film set in a sock factory, Whisky, was a gem, as was the Japanese comedy The Complete Japanese Showa Songbook. The closing film, I Love Huckabees, brought just the right level of lightness, intellect and amiability to the last night.. In Birth, the tall, sleek actress in the Chanel denim coat I’ve come to meet plays a grieving woman named Anna, who is still pining for a husband who died 10 years ago. One day, just before she’s about to get married to another man, a 10-year-old child approaches her and tells her he’s the reincarnation of her dead husband Before long she believes him. In his bright red bow-tie and cummerbund, his diminutive figure was a marvellous sight.