Nicole Kidman: `I want to be brave'

Despite living the public life of a global celebrity, her personal life routinely splashed across magazines, Nicole Kidman finds the strength to perform by shrinking her world.

"Acting is actually very private," says Kidman. "My husband (country singer Keith Urban) is a performer and he goes out and performs in front of 15,000 fans. That's just not my calling; I could never do it."

Kidman, now 40, stars in two films this fall, beginning with Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding," the young director's follow-up to 2005's "The Squid and the Whale." This December, she will lend her star power to the big-budget fantasy epic "The Golden Compass."

As Margot, though, she gives an exceedingly raw performance of a woman in crisis. A novelist and single mother, her character is brutally honest and neurotic to the extreme.

Although the film, which has an intentionally unpolished, `70s aesthetic to it, has received mixed reviews, Kidman's performance is a welcome sight for fans of the actress whose work since winning an Oscar for 2002's "The Hours" has been checkered with duds like 2004's "The Stepford Wives" and 2005's "Bewitched."

It can be difficult to put a finger on what's made Kidman such a star. (She regularly fetches $17 million or more for a film, though she worked for scale on "Margot.")

New York Times critic A.O. Scott once wrote that the secret to her appeal is the "plucky, disciplined indomitability" she brings to her performances. Film critic David Thomson, who wrote a book last year about Kidman, has called her "the bravest, the most adventurous and most varied" actress of her time.

Neither explanation would seem to jibe with Kidman's description of herself as shy. But it could be Kidman's particular blend of reticence and abandon that has helped build her acting reputation. Even when she throws herself fully into a role, she maintains a mysterious distance, whether in Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999) or as Virginia Woolf in "The Hours."

"For me, it's a very, very private, very intimate place to exist, and I do that with a director in a small little bubble," she said during a recent interview. "And that suits my personality, which is a little more introverted but still in huge desire of sharing ideas and intimacies and secrets and all of those things. I like the delicacy of acting."

Kidman, who was born in Hawaii but raised in Australia, is the daughter of a psychologist and a nurse.

"I spent my childhood in hospitals," she says, suggesting her youth bred an empathy for all types of people. "Because I'm creative, that's where my path as an actor has led me, to show all the different walks of life."