1989: Nicole Kidman, Hollywood calls

ALFRED Hitchcock would have adored her. Billy Wilder would have moulded her. Everyone asks about her.

Nicole Kidman

ALFRED Hitchcock would have adored her. Billy Wilder would have moulded her. Everyone asks about her.

Nicole Kidman has been a constant in the past 25 years of Australian life. She is the counterpoint to the reverence we afford our sportspeople who make it on the global stage. They flame quickly, beholden to their bodies' shelf-life; Kidman has remained on our cinema screens, an indelible old-school movie star in a period of disposable fame.

Kidman was always ambitious. She began acting at 14 and a few years later was savvy enough to host Sydney media for cocktail parties at her parents' house. There followed a couple of career-making performances in the Kennedy-Miller TV series Vietnam and Bangkok Hilton. But it was her role in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm that propelled Kidman from talented teen to desirable leading woman. Hollywood noticed - including Tom Cruise, then the biggest movie star in the world, who immediately cast her opposite him in his new action film, Days of Thunder, and the pair fell in love.

Kidman recalls 1989 as a year of "enormous excitement". She flew first class to the US to promote Dead Calm.

"I wore a suit because I just thought it was so amazing to be flying first class on Qantas," she laughs. "It was a massive thing!" Being in New York, the acting Mecca, opened her eyes to possibilities of one day living and working there.

She was alive to the "intoxicating" opportunities being presented to her but questioned "whether I was going to be able to make something of them".

But the personal has always preceded the professional, in her actions and memories. "As much as I have films and all that sort of stuff, a lot of my memories are to do with relationships and love," she reveals. "Which probably says something about me as a person. I enjoy deeply intimate relationships, either professionally or romantically."

While 1989 was the year she was becoming a film star, her memory of it remains of "being in love and then falling out of love [with Australian actor Marcus Graham] and then falling in love with someone else" [Tom Cruise].

"I was told that it would be very, very harmful to my career if I married Tom," she recalls. "And I thought, 'Oh well, I don't care' basically, which has been my mentality my whole life. I've been incredibly impetuous and spontaneous which is, you know, good and bad."

That period wasn't one of fear, confusion or excitement but of "caution to the wind".

"And as much as it was happening fast it didn't seem fast to me. And as much as it seemed like travelling in this different world it didn't feel like that, it felt real."

But it was fast. She married Cruise in 1990, when she was 23, and adopted their first child at 25. "I did everything very young; I really wanted to get married, I really wanted to have children and most of my craft was about that because I'm very, deeply romantic," she says, recalling growing up in thrall to the Bronte sisters and the "great tragic love stories". "I'm a jump-offthecliff kind of girl."

That girl has become the leading lady she wanted to be, our only lead actress Oscar winner, for The Hours, a mentor and door-opener for other Aussies, a patron for many arts, film and health institutions and causes, a UN Goodwill Ambassador, wife and mother.

She has represented Australia on the world stage with distinction. And her output is still prodigious: she has two new films - The Railway Man, to be released on Boxing Day, and Grace of Monaco, coming out in January.

Now, at 46, she confesses to moments of reflection. "It's kind of mind-blowing at times; I go, 'Wow!'" But, she adds, "It's not as though I sat around twiddling my thumbs. I was really focused and I really worked hard and my passion for the artistic paths was just so alive that that carried me through so much." But she admits struggling in roles that "weren't really part of me or I felt didn't fit properly".

These include her roles in Bewitched, Just Go With It and The Stepford Wives.

Consequently, her path during the 25 years "has been quite winding, which is what I like". It shows in her choices; she often gambles on a director's crucial second film, such as Stephen Daldry's The Hours, or Jonathan Glazer's Birth.

"They've been times when I've had enormous success and that's been as thrilling as it is but it's a very precarious place to sit in if you're alone - and I was alone for a lot of my success," Kidman says. "I wasn't surrounded by what I felt was a lot of safety, so it felt uncomfortable at times. Which is not being ungrateful but I probably didn't have a great capacity to handle it."

Her divorce from Cruise remains a "devastating" memory and regret "because it's so sad on your children".

Today, living in Nashville with husband Keith Urban and two young daughters, Faith and Sunday, Kidman sounds very safe. "Now I look back on it, there's so much joy," she says of the years since 1989. "But a lot of human nature, particularly an artistic nature, is the struggle, it's not the coasting along.

There's that thing that happens when you reach a particular age, where the past is full of incredible memories that are so good and delicious and also bittersweet. I'm quite comfortable with that mix because with the joy comes the sadness. But to have a five-year-old and a two-year-old at this age is just glorious. To be able to see the world through their eyes right now is, oh ... " She sighs with joy.

ALSO IN 1989

Bill Hayden becomes governor-general

Allan Border leads Australia to 4-0 Ashes win in England; he is Australian of the Year

Gaby Kennard is the first Australian woman to fly solo around the world

Newcastle earthquake kills 13 people

Uni fees reintroduced under HECS

John Clarke and Bryan Dawe's mock interviews debut on ABC-TV

Kate Ceberano is ARIA's Best Female Artist