Pleiades forwarded this little article about how Nicol Kidman is going to spend this festive season in the US because she's been devastaed by the bad reviews for 'Australia'.
A close friend said the Oscar winner was upset at not celebrating daughter Sunday Rose's first birthday in Sydney.
"She's been so upset by all of it," the friend said. "It really has devastated her."
Although Kidman has received some positive reviews for her role as Lady Sarah Ashley in the Baz Luhrmann epic - including from respected ABC critic Margaret Pomeranz - much of the media attention, at home and abroad, has been negative.
"People seem to to be really going for her; I don't quite get it," Kidman's friend said.
"Many of Australia's own critics gave her strong praise in the role - why are we ignoring what our own critics are saying? It seems very unfair - and it is very distressing for Nicole."
Even longtime allies of Kidman have been on the attack. Deborah Thomas, editorial director of Australian Women's Weekly, ridiculed her on Channel Nine's Today show last week for saying she had only used sunscreen to keep her face looking youthful. Thomas urged Kidman to be more open about any cosmetic procedures she might have had.
Then, it's the usual claim that she's a tall poppy. It probably is the tall Poppy syndrome but I sort of think she called it on herself.
I've been thinking about this quite a bit because I don't think I know many people who keep can keep a straight face when you tell them "Nicole Kidman is a great actress". It's really interesting because in Sydney where I live at least, there's a feeling that people can see right through her acting to see her. People who are otherwise positive, nice, normal people scowl their faces and tell me how awful she is and then unleash an anecdote about just how awful she is in real life.
What to make of it? I have a few anecdotes. She was this girl who would get on the school bus last and declare to the entire bus she was going to be famous star; she was the woman who slept with producer Terry Hayes to get a plum role, then dumped him for a bigger fish; She is absolutely mean and condescending to shop attendants and receptionists (I've heard this from about 5-6 people who have served her); she sacked her Australian agent June Cann from the airport by phone as she left for her first big USA film 'Days of Thunder'; Her contribution to a Tsunami relief telethon was a poster of herself form 'Moulin Rouge!' with her autograph which was then auctioned and then raised a paltry 3-digit figure- and this was from Australia's richest woman; and that's just some of the more memorable accusations against her person.
All this vitriol in the people in her hometown has got to be invidia -envy of the worst kind. I mean, I get it. She's a dreadful human being to people she doesn't know, she's a hopeless narcissist to people who meet her casually, and yet people who work with her tell you she's quite a nice in person, really. Well, that sounds like a typical movie star.
So when people see her on the screen in Sydney, there's this groan of recognition. She is like a mirror that reflects everybody's own narcissism and desire to be more beautiful through cosmetic surgery and the greedy, greedy desire to be rich AND famous and be lauded for it. Just how the hell did she do it? It must have been through evil, underhanded means, a pact with the devil - or scientology and Tom Cruise - whatever it took. The bitch! Thus people walk out of the cinema riven with self-loathing. It's particularly bad on the North Shore where she grew up, exactly because she represents what can only be described as: 'There but for the Acts of the Devil go I'.
That's got to be envy. Is it fair? No. is it understandable? Entirely. All the same, Kidman really hasn't done enough to make her hometown forget the slights. One of the rules of success is that you don't get to "go home to Kansas". Because there are people waiting with knives of envy back in Kansas for Dorothy-Judy Garland. It's sort of surprising that somebody who was smart enough to marry Tom Cruise without a pre-nup can't figure out why her hometown thinks she's awful.
Me? I don't like her at all because I too see the preening North Shore girl in everything she does, so it doesn't matter what she seems to be doing as an actor, her being and presence mitigates against me actually seeing the performance as anything but crafted and forced. She's always seemed like she was playing "Nicole Kidman the actress doing her acting thing"predicated in just about everything I've seen. Her much lauded work in 'To Die For' worked because we could accept that this character was totally in line with who I thought I saw. i.e. it worked because it was the closest thing to what we saw of her.
She's played interpreters and foreigners, a scientist, and a brain surgeon (at 23!) and none of them seemed to reflect on my own experiences of being an interpreter, a foreigner or even a medical student. In that sense her career has been an exercise in demolishing credibility rather than building it. She's played sirens who are dispyronic and housewives with little charm. What do you make of an unconvincing actress who seems to make a cold charmlessness her trade mark signature thing?
The fact that she would want her hometown to love her, accept her and embrace her is actually a little pathetic.
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