At a glance…
- Australian actress Nicole Kidman shared the birth of her daughter, Faith Margaret, exclusively with The Australian Women’s Weekly in February 2011.
- Faith Margaret is Nicole’s fourth child, she’s sister to Sunday Rose and step sister to Isabella and Connor. She was born via a surrogate.
- Nicole Kidman was the cover star of the February 2011 issue of The Weekly with an exclusive interview about motherhood and marriage with journalist Bryce Corbett.
Only a day after announcing to the world the addition to her family of baby Faith Margaret, Nicole Kidman spoke exclusively to The Australian Women’s Weekly to express her joy.
In an email to The Weekly‘s Editor-in-Chief Helen McCabe, Nicole wrote of the anxiety she and her husband Keith felt in the lead-up to the birth of their daughter, Faith Margaret.
“As you can imagine, we spent Christmas on tenterhooks,” Nicole wrote. “And after Faith Margaret was born on December 28, a healthy 8 lbs 9 oz, we spent New Year on cloud nine. We have been having a wonderful bonding experience with Faith Margaret. And it is really wonderful to know that our delight is being shared by you and your readers. We feel truly blessed.”
The latest addition to the Kidman-Urban clan, a sister to two-and-a-half-year-old Sunday Rose, and step-sister to Isabella, 18 and Connor, 16, was born to a surrogate mother in Nashville. In an impressive feat of remaining mum, news of Faith Margaret’s existence was hidden from the public until three weeks after she was born.
The Weekly has learned that not even Nicole’s closest confidantes, including representatives, colleagues and agents, were aware of the pregnancy until 10 days before the birth.
Nicole and Keith had hoped to keep the birth a secret for another couple of months but were forced to announce baby Faith’s arrival when celebrity news website TMZ got hold of the story. News that the celebrity couple used a surrogate — or “gestational carrier” — to bear their biological child has unleashed a storm of debate about the issue of surrogacy. Unconfirmed reports say Nicole and Keith, both 43, tried natural conception and IVF before opting for surrogacy. They have not commented on the identity of the surrogate mother or on whether the woman was paid.
“I think I’m at a point where I’ve just had so many things said about me that I just ignore it,” she tells The Weekly. “I’m 43 now. I live my life knowing who I am and knowing that it will play out over however long it is that I have left to live. It’s my life. It’s my whole life, and I’ll lead it how I choose.”
In The Weekly interview, Nicole also speaks frankly about her children, Isabella and Connor, why she refuses to discuss their lives publicly, and her profound love for them. And ten years after her divorce from Tom, Nicole describes how she took a long time to recover from the breakdown of that high-profile relationship in our interview.
“I just really wanted to spend time alone so I could heal,” she says. “And that took me almost six years, which is unusual, I know, but that was just how it was. It had to do with me not having anything to give anyone else.
Read on for our EXCLUSIVE February 2011 cover story.
“My family are my priority now”
Beautiful, blessed and besotted. Nicole Kidman is in her prime as wife, mother and true-blue Aussie. As Bryce Corbett chats to her about life and love with Keith Urban, their daughter Sunday Rose, and her Oscar-worthy role in ‘Rabbit Hole’, he discovers there is still one subject she won’t talk about…
In her movie Rabbit Hole, Nicole Kidman plays a mother devastated by the accidental death of her four-year-old son. For a good part of the film, the pain being felt by Nicole’s character Becca is internalised. The audience is in no doubt that grief has torn Becca’s world apart; that she is now confronted with a life she had no clue she would one day have to live and is struggling to find the emotional tools to live it. And yet, she remains contained. In a climactic scene with her husband, played by Aaron Eckhart, Becca finally cracks. “It feels like maybe I don’t feel badly enough for you!” she wails. “Maybe I’m not feeling enough!”
It’s a cry to let her grieve in the manner she chooses. To show that beyond the composure is a heart riven with unimaginable pain, and that while to the outside world she may appear detached and incomprehensibly serene, deep down she is hurting as anyone else in her situation would. The role – and indeed the film, of which Nicole is a proud producer – is generating serious Oscar buzz. It’s only acting, of course, but such is the passion that Nicole has for the film and such was the single-minded determination with which she pursued its realisation, you are left to wonder if it perhaps deals with issues and themes closer to Nicole Kidman’s heart than she could ever say.
Nicole Mary Kidman is sitting opposite me, perched on the edge of a bed in a small suite of the Blue Hotel in Woolloomooloo, Sydney. A southerly buster is crackling above the cityscape outside the window, and cockatoos screech as they dart above treetops in the Royal Botanic Gardens. Up close, she’s strikingly attractive. Yes, the skin on her face is flawless, but not in an apparently fake way. There are smile lines at the corners of her eyes and frown lines on her forehead.
She looks like your garden-variety, genetically-blessed, sun-averse, Hollywood megastar. She’s wearing a figure-hugging dress. The tiny tummy, which has sparked rumours of a pregnancy but which Nicole assures me is not another Urban-Kidman co-production but simply the result of “too many hamburgers” and the Kidman women’s tendency to little tums, is not in evidence today. She looks svelte and elegant. Offsetting the poise and confounding the image of an old-world movie star is a broad Aussie accent (with an occasional American twang) and an endearing gangliness, a kind of angular awkwardness, as if her limbs are so long that she’s not entirely sure what to do with them. On the subject of Rabbit Hole, Nicole says she was moved to produce and star in the film because it was a role that resonated with her as a mother.
“There’s a chord that it hits as a parent that is terrifying,” she says. “I so believe in the story. I believe in the truth of it and the hope that’s in it.”
The film charts the uncertain course of a marriage rocked by the death of a child. While bleak, it is a movie leavened with humour and ultimately lifted by the victory of the couple’s relationship in the face of a trauma that could so easily have torn it apart.
“I want to believe in the sanctity of marriage,” explains Nicole. “And I want to believe in the union of two people. I want to show that no matter what you get hit with, no matter what pain you are dealt, there is a way to get through it as a married couple. And I suppose that’s just where I’m at. Because I want that to be true.”
Exactly where she is at right now is shaped in no small part by her status as contented wife to Australian country rock star Keith Urban and full-time mother to their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Sunday Rose. They live in Nashville, Tennessee, in an impressive but not over-the-top family pile on a private housing estate where the houses are big but the fences are few. As Nicole herself is quick to admit, it’s a very good place she’s currently inhabiting and one that is doubtless made all the sweeter by the fact it wasn’t so long ago she was in much darker surroundings.
It’s been 10 years since her decade-long marriage to Tom Cruise came to a sudden end. She now says she was so thrown by the split that she spent years in the relationship wilderness. It was a whole six years after her divorce when fellow Aussie-done-good in America Keith sauntered into her life and asked how her heart was, and she was able to reply: “Open”.
“I took a long time to heal, put it that way,” she says now. “I was just very cautious. So when I gave Keith that answer, it was true. For the first time in what had been quite a few years, my heart was open. And that’s why I say it’s all about the right timing, because he came at a time when I wasn’t closed. And there were people before who had tried to date me, and I was like: ‘No, no, wrong girl.’ I just really wanted to spend time alone so I could heal. And that took me almost six years, which is unusual, I know, but that was just how it was. It had to do with me not having anything to give anyone else.
“I just wanted a family. I’m just the kind of girl who likes to be married. I mean, I don’t just want to be married for the sake of being married, but I want to be in a deep relationship. That was my priority. I was looking for that. And because I didn’t have that, I just decided to work. I was hiding in my work.”
She is, by her own admission, an all-or-nothing kind of girl. When love was off the radar, she threw herself into her work. And then, after marrying Keith and welcoming Sunday Rose into their lives, work became an afterthought.
“I’ve always been that way,” she says. “It was Keith who urged me to do this film, and all my life I’ve had my mum say to me: ‘Don’t give everything up”, which tends to be what I do. But I could easily just nest. I like being at home. I like being with Sunday, and my days can just sort of drift by. And before I know it, a year’s gone by, and I haven’t really done anything. But then I also figure I’ve worked most of my life and I feel like I have earned the time to be with the people I love. And I want to raise her. I really want to raise Sunday properly. And she’ll probably be like: ‘Come on, Mum, leave me alone. But that’s okay with me. I’d rather she was like that than asking: ‘Where’s my mummy?’ ”
It’s a conversational segue which would appear to bring us neatly to the subject of Isabella, 18, and Connor, 16, the two children Nicole adopted with Tom. And so I ask: Isabella and Connor appear to mostly live with their dad?
“Yes.”
Is that tough for you? You want to be active in the raising of your children, but you’re not a part of their everyday life?
“It’s something I don’t even talk about in the press.”
It’s something that people who are interested in you are curious about. They saw you arrive in Australia many years ago with two toddlers in your arms, and now they wonder…
“Yeah, but it’s their life, and it’s not to be discussed publicly. I’ve never discussed any of that publicly. Except to say that I absolutely love them.”
And so we are left to watch the soap opera of the Kidman-Cruise marriage fallout through the prism of gossip magazines, and we form unshakeable opinions based on half-truths and suppositions. But the fundamental facts of the matter are uncontested – she was once a full-time mother of two, and now she’s only a full-time mother of one.
Two little people she reared, two little sets of hands she held and two warm little bodies she hugged to her and comforted when they stirred in the middle of the night are no longer a part of her daily life. And not even Hollywood superstar status can render a mother immune to the acute pain of that. Worse, she’s had to endure it all stoically while the celebrity circus whirls around her and fanciful theories on every personal relationship she holds dear are bandied about thoughtlessly like so much public property.
The combination of Isabella and Connor’s schooling in the controversial religion of Scientology, plus the fact they live with their father, means that Nicole is guarded in her every public utterance about her two older children. That and the fact that, when all is said and done, it’s really nobody’s business but hers. Do you care about people’s perceptions about what might have happened?
“At this stage, I don’t care what people’s perceptions might be about any of it. It’s my life. It’s my whole life, and I’ll lead it how I choose.”
It must be strange when your entire life is raked over, and very personal issues are subject to public conjecture. Does it bother you or do you just ignore it all?
“I think I’m at a point where I’ve had so many things said about me that I just ignore it. I’m 43 now. I live my life knowing who I am and knowing that it will play out over however long it is that I have left to live. I would hope that at the end of it all my authenticity will shine through and my life will shine through. All I can do in the meantime is live my life the best that I can and take care of the people in my life the best that I can. I’m lucky that I have a lot of love in my life.”
“I have a man in my life who loves me. We have Bella and Connor, who we absolutely adore. And we have a two-year-old. I truly believe that ultimately, who you are as a person is shown over a period of time. We can all say who we are, but actions speak louder than words. That’s the only way of doing it – is just to live. And saying: ‘OK, I’ve got nothing to hide. And that’s all I can do.’ In the meantime, I don’t believe in talking and I don’t believe in complaining. That’s just how I was raised.”
The thing that has to be remembered about Nicole Kidman – and the thing that seems to be so often forgotten – is that she remains one of our country’s most successful artistic exports. The films she has appeared in over the years have grossed more than $2 billion at the box office. Even Australia, the Baz Luhrmann-directed epic that starred Nicole and copped a critical panning, is the second highest-grossing film of all time at the Australian box office after Crocodile Dundee.
Despite a reputation as an ice princess, she doesn’t have any airs or graces. She’s loyal, having retained in Wendy Day the same Australian publicist since long before she was a million-dollar movie star. When bushfires ravaged Victoria two years ago, she and Keith gave $500,000 to the Red Cross relief fund. Then, when Baz asked her to star in Australia – a paean to their homeland and a movie whose making would provide a shot in the arm to the local film industry – she didn’t hesitate. When Oprah Winfrey asked if she’d fly home to appear in a taping of the TV queen’s talk show on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, she hopped on a plane. She’s a proud, internationally feted Australian and yet her affection for her country of birth so often goes unrequited.
The chorus of derision from some quarters after Australia was released was so vicious it reportedly forced Nicole into self-imposed exile. When asked about it now, she’s magnanimous, but you can’t help but think that despite having spent 20 years in Hollywood developing a thick skin, some barbs must still sting.
“Baz and Hugh [Jackman] and I went out to make that film with so much love of this country,” says Nicole. “And I would have loved for it to have been received better, but I’m used to that. I was in Stanley Kubrick’s film (Eyes Wide Shut) with Tom, and the expectations around that film were just massive and it didn’t live up to what people hoped. But you can’t have a long career without ups and downs, ebbs and flows. It’s the same with life.”
“To be honest, I feel like I get an enormous amount back from Australia. I look at it in terms of what this country has given me, and I was given the most incredible childhood because I grew up in Australia. I was able to follow my dream and appear in movies because I grew up in Australia. Whatever I give back to this country comes out of gratitude for all it’s given me. So much of who Keith and I are has to do with where we have come from. And we both want to make sure we pass on some of that to Sunday. And that’s why we come back as often as we can, because she needs some of that spirit.”
The new-look Nicole is a woman who has very clearly found love, and it’s an uncomplicated, straightforward, what-you-see-is-what-you-get Aussie love. On red carpets, she and Keith hold hands. Public displays of affection – of the real, rather than jumping-on-couches kind – are commonplace. Nicole says she “would love to have more kids” with Keith and speaks openly of what a wonderful father he is.
“We’re extremely close, and we’re very, very protective of each other,” she says. “When I was alone, [the barbs] used to hurt more. But I now have such a protective environment, it doesn’t hurt as much. Once there is love in your life, it’s incredibly healing and incredibly protective. Because it really doesn’t matter. And I’m talking about a really strong, pure love.”
And it’s a love that seems to be mutual – and then some. Keith has just written and released an album whose lyrics read like the world’s most public love letter.
“I can’t remember feeling love like this, I’m so alive/ I can’t imagine living life without you by my side,” Keith sings in one song on his new album Get Closer. And in another: “Along comes a baby girl, and suddenly my little world just got a whole lot bigger.”
Says Nicole: “I’m married now to the person who, you know, ’til death do us part. I wouldn’t have gotten married again if I didn’t feel like that was the case with us. And unless some hideously terrible thing happened, that’s what we have both pledged to each other – and there’s a great comfort in that.”
At the end of Rabbit Hole, Becca and her husband appear to have found peace. The marriage has survived, and the oath they took to stand by one another in good times and bad has prevailed. And though they sit together in their backyard and look out across a lake, staring down an uncertain future, they at least have the comfort of knowing they are doing it together. They don’t speak, because nothing needs to be said. The scene is in upstate New York, but it could just as easily be in Nashville.
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the February 2011 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
