Cannes,
France – May 24: Actress Nicole Kidman attends the "The Paperboy"
photocall during the 65th Annual Cannes Film Festival. Source: The Sunday Telegraph
Megan Lehmann, The Sunday Telegraph, reports
When Nicole Kidman last attended the Cannes Film Festival in 2003, she was so thrilled to be there she jumped up and down on the bed at the exclusive Hotel du Cap where she was staying.
Reminded of that moment of exuberance, she laughs.
"I now jump on it with Keith," she tells Insider. "I don't have to do it alone."
The actress has never been happier - and why shouldn't she be. Her career is riding a huge resurgence thanks to two headline-grabbing movies screening at Cannes - The Paperboy and Hemingway & Gellhorn.
And on the home front, she's pleased Australian television audiences have fallen for her Grammy-winning country superstar husband, Keith Urban, on The Voice."I don't think they realised how great he is," Kidman says.
"He's just such an Aussie boy from Caboolture who's still
got that. And talent beyond, I mean you haven't seen anything yet."
Dressed in a monochromatic Mad Men-style Dior dress and looking out from the top floor of Cannes' Majestic Hotel at the sparkling Mediterranean below, the five-time veteran of the French film festival is sitting pretty.
Her show-stopping turn in the swampy Southern noir The Paperboy has garnered some of the best notices of her career. Her character, a cougarlicious bottle-blonde floozy, gets hot and heavy with a convicted murderer and sparks a fire in Zac Efron's small-town boy.
For Hemingway & Gellhorn, she bares all in a couple of toe-curling sex scenes with Clive Owen.
At 44, with two children under five - Sunday Rose, 4, and one-year-old Faith Margaret - Kidman has never looked hotter.
Urban obviously agrees, travelling 35 hours from Sydney to carry his wife's clutch purse on the red carpet at The Paperboy premiere.
"He and I met later in life and I think when you meet later in life as a couple you have a much better chance of really going to a deep place," she muses. "I think when you're younger - and sometimes not, because my parents met when they were 23 - but for us we met later in life and we kind of know who we are and where we're at."
Scorching on screen, Kidman may be - fearless, not so much.
"No, I have a tremendous amount of fear, but I just push through it," she says. "I'll feel terrified but then I'll just go, 'So what's the worst that can happen?' And I try to do that in terms of everything I do, even falling in love. I'm going to love to the fullest that I can because, why not, you know?
And I'm going to love my children that way and I'm going to love my husband that way and maybe there's going to be pain but I'm willing to accept the pain."
Kidman likes to mix it up and says she deliberately offset her "raw and dangerous" performance as an "oversexed Barbie doll" in The Paperboy with a role in Hemingway & Gellhorn. In the TV biopic she plays Martha Gellhorn, a war correspondent who had a combustible relationship with American literary lion Ernest Hemingway and was married to him for five years.
"She had extraordinary spirit and tenacity and compassion, and she wanted to see the atrocities of the world and give voice to the voiceless," Kidman says. "That sort of stuff I just bow to - that's a force. It may not be my force because I have different desires, but I wanted the story to be told."
It's important to her that her daughters are given strong female role models. "I've always tried to step out as a woman to protect other women," she says.
"Only because it is tougher sometimes for women - there is more criticism a lot of times, and the choices that women make are judged more harshly."
Hemingway & Gellhorn airs on Showcase on September 9. The Paperboy is set for release early 2013
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