Nicole Kidman

Like Katharine Hepburn and Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman is a very serious actress. Like Grace Kelly, she is a classy dame, a princess from the Pacific. And like Marilyn or Rita Hayworth, she makes a saucy pin-up, who just loves being photographed. The combination is sensational, and no one can argue about her being the great star actress of the moment. She is mistress to an astonishing range of parts, but she is also the Chanel woman, a face and a body made iconic on billboards, in TV commercials, on magazine covers, on the Internet and in our dreams. But there is something mysterious and not quite settled about Nicole Kidman, which is why David Thomson, one of the world's most imaginative writers on film, wanted to write about her. He realized that there wasn't another career so single-minded about being a star, a figure on all our horizons. So he tracks her from Australia to the larger world and back again from Dead Calm, Days of Thunder and To Die For to Eyes Wide Shut, Moulin Rouge, The Others, Birthday Girl, The Hours, Dogville, Birth and Fur. In this arc a curly-haired girl from Hawaii and Sydney has become ... whatever she wants to be. Has it been easy? Pain-free? Without problems? Look at those blue eyes - so carefree once and already now those of a woman about to be forty, the next great challenge in her determined evolution. What happens when a woman discovers the power to move millions of strangers? And what happens to those who watch - the strangers?