NICOLE Kidman wants to talk about her pushiness. Her alleged pushiness, that is. Recent articles have suggested she as good as bullied fellow Australian Jane Campion into giving her the plum part of Isabel Archer in Portrait Of A La Back in 1995, the press suggested she goaded director Gus Van Sant into casting her as the career-vaulting weatherwoman Suzanne Stone in To Die For.
Actually, Kidman tells me, "I was kind of shy to call Jane. Not until I heard that she was interested in me for the role did I ever have the guts to call her. You go after roles to a certain extent, but that gets misrepresented."
Kidman is no stranger to the rumour mill. Rarely can there have been more stories circulating about one actor. It has been alleged that her marriage to Tom Cruise is a means of promoting her career.
Of course, there is the story that the marriage was set up by the Scientologists - both Kidman and Cruise are keen followers of L Ron Hubbard's creed.
Whatever, Kidman eventually delivered a performance of graceful restraint in this wonderfully dark rendition of the Henry James novel. Gone is the bubbly Isabel who occupies the book's first few hundred pages. As the American expatriate who inherits a fortune and marries a sadist, Kidman. moves and reacts so cautiously that in the few scenes where she externalises her emotions you shudder from the impact.
Martin Donovan and Barbara Hershey both won prizes for their work in the film. So does it bother he? that she hasn't won anything? "The only thing that matters is that Jane said that I fulfilled all her wishes and more," says Kidman. And she seems to mean it.
"As an actress, your greatest fear is letting the director down and not fulfilling her needs and wants - especially when you're in almost every frame, because then you've destroyed the movie."
Fifteen years ago in Australia, Campion cast a 14-year-old Kidman for a lead in her student short, A Girl's Own Story. But Kidman's headmistress forced her to decline so she could study for exams. Campion sent Kidman a note asking her to "protect her talent," and talked about using her in "a classic role" in the future. Later, the part of the relatively normal sister in Sweetie came up. Campion bypassed Kidman, who found the snub "devastating".
A Girl's Own Story explores emergent female sexuality (two teenage girls draw a man's penis and practise heterosexual love-making), a leitmotif in Campion's work. Kidman says this is also a subject close to her own heart: "Jane wanted to boldly explore repressed sexuality in Portrait." One of the film's strongest scenes is a masturbatory fantasy in which a nearly faint Isabel imagines herself making love to all three of her suitors at the same moment.
Kidman says her relationship with Campion was often fraught. "I think Jane disliked me, or there was a sort of frustration with me at the beginning. I was overawed, and a director of that stature doesn't want to be put on a pedestal. After we went through a whole audition process, and she told me she didn't know if she wanted me to do the role, I got angry. I got upset, too," Jane said, `I really made a mistake; you're going to have to audition'. I admired her for being so blatant about it. I suppose that's when we knew we could work together."
Campion says: "I told Nicole she had to earn the role. Originally, I had said yes, then I got cold feet. I couldn't go into two years of work with an actress I wasn't sure was the right person. She was devastated. She was a little bit in awe of me before then, and then she just thought I was disgusting, completely despicable. And she just got very straight. Nicole's quite shy, but when she's angry she's very direct. I was going, `This is really good, the way you're talking to me now.' This put us on a strong footing."
THE bumpy course paid off. "I came out of this film feeling an enormous rapport and friendship with Jane that will last for the rest of our lives," says Kidman. "We hang out together all the time."
Long before To Die For's flamboyant Suzanne rescued her from a string of Hollywood bombs (Far And Away, Malice, Billy Bath gate, My Life), several Australian films showed that Kidman could project an in-your-face presence to make Isabel look mousy. Take the 1986 teen surf film Windrider, in which she co-stars with muscular pretty-boy Tom Burlinson, her then-boyfriend and a blond, fuller-faced version of Tom Cruise. (Both men are nearly a head shorter than Kidman, who is 5 foot 10 inches.) The 18-year-old Kidman played Jade, a rude. crude, fast-talking rocker.
"I'm appalling in that film!" shrieks Kidman, astonished that I've seen it. "I just made that movie and came right back home." She laughs. "You can say that every life experience leads you to where you are today, but you're still allowed to have some regrets."
Kidman retains strong ties to her homeland. "I could have been just as happy working in Australia and occasionally coming to the States and doing a film. I love it there. I just recently bought a house there for Tom and me and the kids (three-year-old Isabella Jane and 22-month-old Connor Anthony, both of whom the couple adopted)."
She remains close to her parents, Janelle and Antony, a couple of "left-wing academics". Her mother was a "very strong women's libber". Kidman remembers: "I would be dragged along to the Women's Electoral Lobby from the age of seven or eight, and I'd have to hang around, and I'd be so bored. The thing my parents actually gave me, as a child, was a strong political awareness. We'd sit around the dinner table, and they'd be, `OK, what's the topic for tonight?'. Everyone would have to know about it you'd debate it. I hated it. But it gave me the ability to have an opinion and to defend it."
She also credits her parents with nurturing her artistic ambitions. You'd learn the violin, and then you'd be learning the clarinet, and then you'd be learning the piano. But it wasn't driven towards success. It's strange how people always ask, `So you wanted always to be famous?' And I think, `Famous? That has nothing to do with it.' I just wanted to be a good actor."
Kidman made her first film, Bush Christmas, at 14 and moved to the US around six years ago. Despite the success of To Die For and Portrait Of A Lady, it has often been suggested that she would never have survived her many movie failures had she not been married to Cruise.
She dismisses the allegations of a career marriage. "When you choose to spend your life with someone, it has to be because of the pure reasons. Six years ago, when I'd go up for roles, being married to Tom Cruise was almost more of a hindrance. People would just say, `Oh, that's just the wife of Tom Cruise; no, we're not interested'. Your identity is tied in so strongly with your husband that people feel like they already know you, and there's nothing interesting you can show them.
Kidman could live with the idea of losing work because of Cruise, but no one has ever accused her of being a slouch. Richard E. Grant, who plays Isabel's frustrated suitor in Portrait, talks about her unnatural appetite for work.
"She did 16-hour days for four months, and, except when she got ill a couple of times, was the first one on the set," he says. He was surprised by her great sense of humour. Campion describes her as a perfectionist, demanding retake after retake.
Meanwhile, Kidman says that working with Campion prepared her to act for another obsessive perfectionist - Stanley Kubrick, for whom she and Cruise are playing leads in Eyes Wide Shut. The film, "about sexual obsession and jealousy", according to Kidman, is being shot in typical Kubrickian secrecy near London.
She says she and Cruise have "very separate relationships" with Kubrick, and occupy separate trailers. "It was good that I made Portrait before this film, because it allowed me to not feel completely intimidated. So much of it when you work with a director of Stanley's stature is the intimidation. You feel you can't suggest any idea, because it'll never be up to their standard. And he is amazing."
Kidman talks about another project she recently completed, the action movie Peacemaker which will be the first film released by Steven Spielberg's Dream Works studio. She plays a nuclear physicist opposite George Clooney's special-forces officer, and says it was important for her to be directed by a woman (first-time director Mimi Leder) who treated her character as a female using her brain rather than "as a man, carrying guns and sort of carrying on".
Campion recently gave a US magazine a different slant on Kidman's Peacemaker experience. "I don't think she had a fabulous time. To me it looks like something an agent would advise you to do to keep your options open." Kidman, however, insists: "I make all my own choices."
Asked about rumours that the Scientologists vet her career choices, she bristles. "Absolutely not. They have absolutely nothing to do with my career, nothing at all." Given that Kidman has just bought the rights to In The Cut, Susanna Moore's violently erotic and explicit novel, that seems plausible enough. "In The Cut is one of those things that everyone will beg me not to do," she says with a laugh.
The book caused a furore when it was published, damned as pornography, the most explicit novel written by a woman. Even Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, called it the most shocking thing he'd ever read. Kidman says she'll probably star in the film, with Campion directing.
"Nobody wanted to make it," says Kidman. "They said it was too dark. But it's a very important piece of literature for women. It's about female sexuality once again, about a woman who is challenging her life.
Doubtless there will continue to be stories about her marriage, the adopted children, the Scientology. But there's no denying that Nicole Kidman's fierce careerism and enormous talent have given us two great characters, Isabel Archer and Suzanne Stone. And who would have thought flouncy Mrs Cruise would end up being chased by Jane Campion and Stanley Kubrick, and planning to turn one of the most shocking novels of recent times into an equally shocking film?