Kidman left black and blue by sex scenes

Nicole Kidman shows off her figure in a sexy minidress in new stills from upcoming movie The Paperboy. Source: The Daily Telegraph

The Sun / The Daily Telegraph report

Nicole Kidman has been left battered and bruised by the violent sex scenes in her latest movie.

Worried director Lee Daniels even offered to stop filming after fearing she had been hurt during the graphic action, The Sun reports.

But the Oscar-winner, 45, insisted they carry on although she needed make-up the next day to cover her bruises.

Co-star John Cusack - who plays a prisoner on Death Row - revealed that some shots were too explicit for harrowing drama The Paperboy.

He said: “There’s a lot more s*** in there that was cut out, believe me. I was afraid I was hurting her, but she was more fearless than me.

“We shot the rough sex scene on day one, and I barely knew her. Next day, Nic showed up with bruises all over her legs.”

Nicole Kidman gets boost to Oscar hopes

Nicole Kidman plays against type in The Paperboy. Picture with her are Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey. Picture: Lionsgate Source: Supplied

Peter Mitchell, The Daily Telegraph, reports

Nicole Kidman's Oscar campaign has received a major boost after scoring a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination.

Kidman was nominated for her sexed-up performance in The Paperboy but also for her role as war correspondent Martha Gelhorn in TV movie Hemingway & Gellhorn.

She will have plenty of mates at the January 27 SAG ceremony, with Naomi Watts and Hugh Jackman also receiving SAG nominations in Los Angeles.

The SAG Awards are one of the major pre-Oscar award ceremonies, with a nomination keeping Oscar campaigns alive, while SAG snubs can torpedo hopes.

Russell Crowe (Les Miserables), Toni Collette (Hitchcock) and Jacki Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook) were snubbed by SAG voters.

Jackman, for his leading performance in Les Miserables, is one of the frontrunners for the best acting Oscar and his SAG best actor nomination continues his journey to a possible Academy Award statuette.

Watts, for the tsunami survivor film The Impossible, is also a great shot at an Oscar nomination after winning over SAG voters.

Kidman's nomination for The Paperboy, based on Peter Dexter's book, was one of the big shocks of the SAG nomination ceremony as the Aussie redhead has received little crecognition for the role.

With Kidman also receiving the nod in the TV category for Hemingway & Gellhorn, her Oscar chances have received a major boost.

Kidman, Jackman, Watts, Crowe, Weaver and Collette have another chance to boost their Academy Award hopes on Friday (AEDT) when the Golden Globes nominations are announced - another major pre-Oscar bellwether.

The Oscar nominations will be revealed on January 10 while the Academy Awards ceremony is scheduled for February 24.

Along with Les Miserables, The Civil War saga Lincoln and comic drama Silver Linings Playbook boosted their Academy Awards prospects with four nominations apiece for the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

All three films were nominated for overall performance by their casts. Also nominated for best ensemble cast were the Iran hostage-crisis thriller Argo and the British retiree adventure The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

Directed by Steven Spielberg, Lincoln also scored individual nominations for Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role as best actor, Sally Field for supporting actress as Mary Todd Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones for supporting actor as abolitionist firebrand Thaddeus Stevens.

Silver Linings Playbook, made by The Fighter director David O. Russell, also had lead-acting nominations for Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence as lost souls who find a second chance at love and Robert De Niro for supporting actor as a gridiron-obsessed dad.

Besides Watts and Lawrence, best-actress nominees are Jessica Chastain as a CIA analyst pursuing Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty; Marion Cotillard as a woman who finds romance after tragedy in Rust and Bone; Helen Mirren as Alfred Hitchcock's strong-willed wife in Hitchcock.

Joining Cooper, Day-Lewis and Jackman in the best-actor field are John Hawkes as a polio victim aiming to lose his virginity in The Sessions and Denzel Washington as a boozy airline pilot in Flight.

One of the year's most-acclaimed films, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, earned only one nomination, supporting actor for Philip Seymour Hoffman as a mesmerising cult leader. The film was snubbed on nominations for ensemble, lead actor Joaquin Phoenix and supporting actress Amy Adams.

Other individual performances overlooked by SAG voters include Anthony Hopkins in the title role of Hitchcock, Keira Knightley in the title role of Anna Karenina, Bill Murray as Franklin Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson and Argo director Ben Affleck, who also starred in the film.

Actor Maggie Smith had four individual and ensemble nominations. Along with sharing the ensemble honor for Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Smith joined the cast of Downton Abbey among TV ensemble contenders and had nominations for supporting film actress as a cranky retiree in Marigold Hotel and TV drama actress for Downton Abbey.

Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston had three overall nominations, as best actor in a TV drama for Breaking Bad, an ensemble honour for Breaking Bad and a film ensemble honour for Argo.

Along with Breaking Bad and Downton Abbey, best TV drama ensemble contenders are Boardwalk Empire, Homeland and Mad Men. TV comedy ensemble nominees are 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory, Glee, Modern Family, Nurse Jackie and The Office.

Kidman shocked at low budget role

Nicole Kidman shows off her figure in a sexy minidress in new stills from upcoming movie The Paperboy. Source: The Daily Telegraph

 

The Daily Telegraph reports

Audiences have been shocked by Nicole Kidman's role as a trashy Southern blonde in controversial new thriller The Paperboy.

But not as shocked as the Aussie actress herself when she learned the realities of low budget filmmaking.
Shot in New Orleans, The Paperboy was made on the kind of budget ($12 million) Kidman hasn't experienced for years and it's understood she had to source much of her on-screen outfits in op shops.

But the biggest shock was when director Lee Daniels told her the film couldn't afford a make-up artist and Kidman would have to do her own hair and makeup.

"I thought we lost her," he joked during an event to honour Kidman in New York overnight.

Nicole Kidman: I want a cougar script

Nicole Kidman definitely seems to have had fun playing a cougar in The Paperboy. Picture: Supplied Source: Supplied

The Daily Telegraph reports

Nicole Kidman is reportedly looking to star in a movie about a "hot cougar".

The 45-year-old star has become increasingly comfortable with her body over the last few years. She appeared in risqué movie The Paperboy alongside Zac Efron and it has apparently got her thinking about her future career choices.

“She feels like she’s finally on top,” a source told National Enquirer. “She is searching for a hot cougar script.”

The star appears scantily clad on the cover of the fall Travel issue of V magazine. Although she wasn’t sure about stripping off to begin with, those close to her convinced her it would look tasteful and sexy.

Nicole is now delighted she went through with the shoot.

“She found it incredibly liberating,” the pal added. “She was thrilled with how the pictures turned out. But Nicole is more self-assured now than ever before. Her marriage to Keith Urban has given her a huge amount of strength.”

Why fired-up Nicole Kidman is smoking

Cannes, France – May 24: Actress Nicole Kidman attends the "The Paperboy" photocall during the 65th Annual Cannes Film Festival. stivals on May 24, 2012 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Andreas Rentz/Getty Images) 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

Nicole Kidman and family in town for wee visit

Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman. Credit: Kevork Djansezian/AP

Annette Sharp, The Daily Telegraph, reports

Fresh from Cannes and all the controversy that followed her being required to pee on her co-star in her latest film, Nicole Kidman flew home to Sydney on Thursday with husband Keith Urban and two pretty young daughters Sunday and Faith.

Looking summery in a floral and cream boho sundress following a week in the south of France, Kidman and her family will settle back into Sydney life for the next three weeks while Urban records The Voice.

Devoted father Urban has been happy enough to remain in his wife's shadow while she promoted The Paperboy with co-stars Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey at Cannes, but yesterday as the pair pulled open the shutters at their Lavender Bay apartment, sources said Kidman was equally delighted to take a back seat now that Keith is enjoying unprecedented fame in Australia.

Kidman heads to Thailand later this month to shoot Death Railway alongside Colin Firth.

Firth plays real-life British Army officer Eric Lomax who was sent to a Japanese POW camp in 1942 and was sent to work on the construction of the Burma Railway.

Kidman plays his wife Patti in the film.

Trampy turn gives Nicole edge

''Booty'' call … Kidman in The Paperboy.

Ed Gibbs, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports

Bouncing back from a string of disappointing films, Nicole Kidman credits her natural instincts - and a willingness to pile on the kilos - for her return to form in The Paperboy.

The 44-year-old actress - who stars opposite John Cusack, Zac Efron and Matthew McConaughey, as a trailer-trash bombshell trying to extricate herself from an erratic convicted felon - also admits to being puzzled by talk of a comeback. In a career that has seen all-time highs (an Oscar win, for The Hours) and, last year, an almighty low, with her film Trespass going straight to DVD, strategy did not, she insists, play any part in her taking on the offbeat noir melodrama.

"I don't think in terms of my career," she told The Sun-Herald in Cannes last week, prior to the film's world premiere at the festival. "I don't have a premeditated [agenda], that's just not my nature in life. Both husbands that I've been married to [ex, Tom Cruise, and current, Keith Urban] I married within three, four months. That's just who I am. I choose roles that way, too."

Kidman's performance includes a scene in which she urinates on a fawning Zac Efron, his body mangled by jellyfish. Prior to that, she re-imagines a certain interrogation sequence from Basic Instinct, in which Sharon Stone famously flashed to camera. Critics have been unanimous in their praise of Kidman's risque turn. The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy saluted the star for "tramping it up", while The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw hailed Kidman as "terrifically good … funny, sexy, poignantly vulnerable".

Lee Daniels, who spent 13 years bringing Peter Dexter's swamp thriller to the big screen, admits he pushed Kidman hard. Kidman, who capitulated to her director's demands to add "more booty" to her slender frame, says: "I don't over think things - I live and die on that. It's spontaneous. Lee [Daniels] knows these people - he toughened me up, he put me on the street.

I met with women that have relationships with men in prison. They told me their stories, and I didn't judge.''

The Paperboy is running in the festival's official competition for the top prize, the Palme D'Or.

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban happy and in love at the Cannes Film Festival

The Lavin gown showed off Nicole Kidman's body to perfection. Picture: AP

The Daily Mail reports

The Cannes Film Festival has certainly brought out the romantic side between happily married Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban.

The country music star and judge on The Voice came out to support his Hollywood actress wife for the premiere of her new movie, The Paperboy.

Proud Keith embraced the 44-year-old actress several times, showering her with kisses and cuddles.

The doting singer even carried his wife's clutch bag as they shared their amorous public display of affection.

Keith let his wife have her time in the spotlight as she walked the red carpet.

The pair then partied together at popular hotspot Beach Club.

Kidman arrived at the premiere in a rose coloured draped Lavin dress that cutaway to reveal her toned upper body.

Kidman's co-star Zac Efron, 24, looked decidedly dapper in a tuxedo as did fellow stars John Cusack and Matthew McConaughey.

The Paperboy is set in the 1960s, with Efron playing an aspiring writer helping his journalist brother, played by McConaughey, investigate a possible miscarriage of justice.

In the film, Efron's Jack falls for Kidman's sparky but sultry femme fatale, who is in turn obsessed with a death row inmate, played by Cusack.

The cast also includes singer Macy Gray as Jack's family maid and surrogate mother, and British actor David Oyelowo as an ambitious big-city journalist.

Kidman worked hard to create Charlotte Bless, interviewing women who were in love with convicts and putting together the character's bold look.

"I'd been looking as an actor for something raw and something dangerous," Kidman said.

"I may be uncomfortable watching the movie. But that's my job - it's my job to give over to something, not to censor it, not to put my own judgments of how I feel as Nicole playing the character. I am there to portray a truth.

"I don't want to be pigeonholed.

"I'm willing to fail because of that. I just want to try."

Efron, who spends much of the film in his underpants, said he felt uncomfortable filming - but that's the way he wanted it.

"I don't think I was supposed to feel comfortable," the former High School Musical star told Cannes.

"It's like life. This character is supposed to be learning the ways of the world, and that can be very uncomfortable. But it's also exciting."

The Paperboy has drawn mixed response in Cannes, where it is one of 22 films up for the Palme d'Or, to be awarded Sunday.

But the actors seem to have adored the experience.

Efron said working with Kidman had been a dream.

"I've been in love with her for a long time - since Moulin Rouge," Efron said.

"It was the loveliest time in the world for me."

Director Lee's last film, Precious, was a surprise hit that won two Academy Awards in 2010.

His next will be The Butler, the story of a long-serving White House staffer in which McConaughey plays John F. Kennedy and Cusack is Richard Nixon.

Australian films prepare to storm Cannes Film Festival 2012

Source: The Sunday Telegraph

The Sunday Telegraph reports

Australia will storm the Cannes Film Festival with both barrels blazing this week and, yes, there will be blood.

A bootlegging western, a hard-boiled gangster story and an explosive Southern noir tale will see a posse of Aussies swagger onto the Croisette, gunning for accolades and attention in a festival pegged to be the most violent yet.

You want names?

Nicole Kidman vamps it up as a bleached blonde floozy in The Paperboy, Kylie Minogue turns auteur's muse in the eccentric French indie Holy Motors, Mia Wasikowska dons a bonnet to play an Amish lass alongside Guy Pearce's sadistic sheriff in Lawless, while the criminally underrated Ben Mendelsohn gets a chance to shine opposite Brad Pitt's mob enforcer in Killing Them Softly.