Nicole Kidman covers the August issue of Vogue (US). Kidman will probably go down in fashion history as one of the best red carpet divas of her era, but I haven’t loved Nicole’s style in years. Basically, everything post-Keith Urban has been terrible-to-boring. Still, Anna Wintour loves Kidman, so Vogue gave her this Peter Lindbergh-shot, Queen of the Desert-themed editorial (Kidman stars in Queen of the Desert, about the life of Gertrude Bell, and the film doesn’t have a release date as of yet). Kidman is striving to look mid-30s, I think. She’s 48. You can read the Vogue interview here. Some highlights:
She’s going back to London to do a play, Photograph 51: “Keith and I always say, ‘We’re doing a play,’ ‘We’re doing a tour,’ because it is like that—the family has to do it together… Even Keith was like, ‘Why are we doing this?’ I need to now push myself into a place I haven’t been for a long time.”
On Keith: “I looked up at him at one point and I saw his tattoos and his foot going, and he had the guitar, and I was like, ‘God, I love that man. I’m so glad I’m in this world.’ ”
Whether she met Keith at just the right time: “Oh, no. I wish I could have met him much earlier and had way more children with him. But I didn’t. I mean, if I could have had two more children with him, that would have been just glorious. But as Keith says, ‘The wanting mind, Nicole. Shut it down.’”
The paparazzi, social media: “We’re the generation that got to duck all of that. When I was with Tom, I don’t remember paparazzi sitting outside our house . . . not like now. This is different.”
Meeting Mia Wasikowska: “I said, ‘You call me anytime. Anytime you need to ask something.’ That’s probably my maternal side, but it’s also a responsibility in the industry. It’s a tough world now. It always was, but it’s particularly tough now.”
Motherhood: “I’ve experienced adoption. I’ve experienced birth with a genetic child. I’ve experienced surrogacy with a genetic child. I speak openly about it because so many of my friends are discussing it. It’s important for other women to go, ‘I get it!’ ”
The only thing I really learned from this Vogue article is that she’s doing a play in London. I didn’t know that. The rest was pretty much a rehash of every Kidman interview from the past few years. She and Keith are happy. She adores her two young children and she doesn’t barely mentions her two older kids, Isabella and Connor. Vogue does note that they asked Kidman about the Church of Scientology and the HBO documentary Going Clear and Vogue says Kidman “declines to discuss” whether CoS “actively tried to break up Cruise and Kidman’s marriage.” Vogue also notes: “Kidman passed on the opportunity to speak to the makers of the film and has consistently turned away requests to comment out of respect for her children with Cruise.” Meaning Connor and Isabella are still very much part of CoS and they probably never see Nicole because she has been deemed the #1 Suppressive Person.
Photos courtesy of Peter Lindbergh/VOGUE.
I still love her as an actress. It’s a shame she messed with her face but she’s still beautiful in a Stepford-wife way.
I’ve always found her overrated as an actress – she has too many annoying mannerisms, I always conscious I’m watching Nicole Kidman rather than the character she’s supposed to be playing.
THIS^
Me too! She mistakes breathiness for acting. Every time I watch one of her movies her breathing drives me mad, all the gasping and gaping and sighing….
Oh, I disagree. I remember seeing her in The Others and To Die For and really being blown away.
Clearly you’ve never seen BMX Bandits then. She was brilliant in that. 😉
I think she’s very good in certain things but she’s not one of those actors who can pull off anything.
With regards to Co$ … Why dredge it up now? It might win her brownie points with the general public but it would only further alienate her from her first two kids and create stress. What little contact she has with them would totally disappear. Also, I’ve seen people say she should have done a Holmes re. the kids but that seems unfair. They were gradually indoctrinated against her over the course of a few years, post divorce. Holmes knew what to do and how to plan because she saw what happened with Kidman. Plus, Co$ was a lot more powerful back in 2000. They’re still rich because of their tax status but they’ve lost a lot of members and the press isn’t scared of attacking them anymore (thanks internet!).
CoSign Glimmer Bunny!
Nicole’s face is just fine, as you can see in the recent video tour where she shows the reporter around her estate. The magazine cover is a terrible photograph, which is entirely the fault of the make-up artist, the photographer, and the editor.
I want to see Q of the D– the costumes look amazing. I really do feel for her re those two children with Cruise- it’s like she really has been erased from their existence. And hope she is happy bec she deserves it after Cruise!
Another boring Vogue cover. Anna should be fired.
I agree, she’s ‘phoning’ it in, meaning this uninspired shoot could have been captured by an iphone and an amateur who regularly reads mags.
I agree. But the picture of her in character as Bell is swoon-worthy.
I know, right?! The cover photo is awful, but the second pic is just gorgeous! Not groundbreaking and not want you’d expect from Vogue, but gorgeous nonetheless.
“Photos courtesy of Peter Lindbergh/VOGUE” I guess Annie didn’t take them. Sorry for my above comment, and the second is way better than the first. I wonder if it was a candid onset.
It’s a slow month – everyone is outta town on vacay so it doesn’t matter who is on the cover. No one cares about August Vogue
A new Anna has been needed for so long!
Yes and yes. Since the Kim/Kanye cover, VOGUE’s reputation as a serious or top fashion publication has been irreparably tarnished by the contamination which is the Kartrashians.
As far as Nicole, YAWN.
TessD – good point. They should have just put an ad for Photoshop in the cover. It would have been less work and sent the same message.
CoS must have a stack of incriminating information about her, for her to still refuse any engagement on the issue. If the rumors are true that Cruise is leaving the cult, I wonder if that will result in any sort of reconciliation with her oldest two children.
I doubt they do, she didn’t really participate which was the problem. I think she still gets a little contact with her children and hasn’t been completely shunned and is doing what she has to to keep it. While I would love to know what happened and what she knows I can’t fault her for protecting what little relationship she can still hold on to with her children.
I’ve been following Co$ for a long time, and have speculated a lot about Nicole Kidman and her situation. Reading how even now, with the cult so vulnerable and exposed as the horrible sham that it is, she still won’t talk… Well, I don’t think it’s because she is concerned any longer about what they could do to her. I think she’s a mother who is desperate for her children to know she did the only she could to show them how much she loves them. One day they will see clearly, and they’ll see that she never sold them out. Nicole has had people insinuate all kinds of things about her and what kind of a mother she is to ‘let’ Tom Cruise take them, but not once has she fought back at the expense of her children. She knows they were too heavily involved and too heavily influenced and she didn’t want to hurt them.
I think she’s being the patient, loving and hopeful mum who knows one day she’ll get them back. And they’ll know how much she always loved them because she never betrayed them.
That’s how I view it as well. I don’t think they have anything over her – I think she’s doing it for the kids. She’s also never spoken poorly of Tom, and I give her tons of credit for that.
I agree. I think she was in a really horrible situation, but not speaking about it is the best she can do for those kids right now. People have said a lot of bad things about her in that regard, but I’ve always believed the kids were turned against her and she couldn’t convince them to come back.
I’m glad she’s ended up happy with a husband and kids, but it still has to hurt every day.
God I’m desperate for a Real Ex-Wives of X̶e̶n̶u̶ Scientology miniseries! Make it so!
I don’t know what information that ridiculous ‘church’ has or doesn’t have on Nicole, but they have never needed a scintilla of truth to ruin people. I suspect Nicole had to sign away her entire life to get out of that cartoon marriage with ego-maniac Tom, including give up her children. No way could anyone compete with Tom’s money and the revenge of the ‘church’. I suspect it took Katie Holmes years and years of carefully planning her escape, gathering very damaging info on Tom and the ‘church’s’ dealings before they let her slip out the side with Suri. Katie would never have made it if her father hadn’t been a top divorce lawyer. I’m very happy this cult is finally being broken down and hope the press reports of Tom deciding that he probably isn’t is a ‘supernatural being who can transport’ (snort) after all, and that he is missing his youngest daughter’s life, are true.
If all you need is a “top” divorce lawyer from Toledo, Ohio to scare that cult, then I hope all the lawyers of Toledo, Ohio band together and form an armada of power. Xenu Cornhole games!
To me it’s like watching little creepy school kids bully other little kids, freely, as if the whole rest of the adult world isn’t around the corner to pound them down.
How this cult keeps on going in sprite of the evidence of those who escaped is beyond me. They were banned in Germany, and I think that’s a cue that America needs to think about.
@Liberty: I think it helped that since day 1 she had a lawyer giving her good advice. Reportedly she never gave any real info in her auditing sessions, which are a huge blackmail tool, and her dad famously created an EPIC prenuptial agreement. And of course, public opinion on the “Church” had changed in the decade between the Holmes and the Kidman divorce.
(Different K, btw!) If I knew that speaking out on the cult that controlled my kids would lessen yet further my chances of ever having a meaningful relationship with them, I’d keep silent, too.
I can’t imagine what it must be like, but my heart goes out to her because I can’t see it being close to bearable.
Oh, CO$. So awful and dangerous. Any organization that separates people from loving family members it deems a threat is a rotten thing full of lies. co$ is a cult, nothing more. At least she seems happy with Keith.
I like both of these photos but they are heavily photoshopped. They made Nicole look younger and less frozen not to mention they made her top lip look better.
The second one makes her look like Naomi Watts.
I’ve always seen a strong resemblance between Nicole and Naomi. Their voices (beyond the accent) are very similar.
Those pics don’t even look like her…when I saw the header pic, before I read the headline, I thought, who is that? Is that Nicole Kidman? It must be horrible to be so invested in the way you look…like Courtney Cox…these beautiful women, who are so afraid to age normally…they are only fooling themselves…
Me, too. I would never have guessed Nicole Kidman. It looks like someone who kind of looks like Taylor Swift.
I think the cover is hideous and is also sad because she used to be such a strikingly beautiful woman, and now she’s just a pale, frozen version of herself. but I still love her, she was the first actress I ever identified as one of my favourites when I was a kid.
I think she avoids discussing Connor and Isabella to avoid further arguments/fight with CoS and Tom, it must be really painful to have your kids taken out of your life like that. I don’t think that her silence means she doesn’t care/love them…
First off – I love that photo of her outdoors with the roses; I’m sure it PS’d like crazy, but it’s lovely and soft.
As far as it goes with her discussing the Co$, there could be legal ramifications…because they love that stuff. And also, she’s already had to go down a long, windy road to get away from their clutches; openly discussing the cult would put her right back on their radar.
It’s a beautiful photo but it looks nothing like her.
Still love Kidman though.
I like the photo with the roses too. She looks very natural ,if that’s possible.
It’s a beautiful photo of a beautiful woman, but it looks nothing like Kidman.
Whoever did the photography did a great job at making her look good. The damage she did to her lips is barely noticeable – which is partially due to her laying off the fillers (perhaps). Not as impressed with the interview – seems too controlled by the interviewee.
Must have been difficult not to have a say on the film considering how much it was revealed (even though some us already knew the extent of that cult). It is heartbreaking to be in that position because no matter how many children you keep having, they can never replace the absence of the others. I hope her two adult kids realize how much their mother hurts for them
If she really had abandoned her two kids with Tom (like people claim she has) I think she’d spill all she knows about CoS. The fact that she doesn’t even make a backhanded slight about CoS makes me think she has hopes her kids will come back to her some day. After all, she’s not all Bill Hudson-ing them and saying they are dead to her.
I don’t think I have ever seen such a photoshopped picture in my life.
I hope she is really happy…but, her “perfect, perfect husband, and family life” reminds me of how Kathie Lee Gifford would always talk about her “perfect life” and then Frank got caught with that stewardess in a hotel!!!! Nicole always sounds “over the top” about how wonderful everything is…I guess I’m a cynic! lol
I always side eye celebrities who says they have the perfect, happy relationship, and they are very much in love because most of the time, it’s the opposite of what’s really going on in the relationship.
That does seem to play out a lot (bragging followed by a scandal or breakup).
They had major issues shortly after their marriage, which hopefully were addressed (his issues, specifically). I was surprised they made it past a year, but so far they are sticking together.
I think she often speaks about how wonderful it is, not to talk it up, but because she’s known the pain of losing her first family with Tom. She probably just appreciates how lucky she is. I’m sure it is wonderful for her, marriage and children is clearly the life she longed for.
Her mouth looks like the surgeon put it in the wrong place
What a sad situation with her older children, I have no doubt it’s because of Scientology. I think she’s a great mom who adores all of her children, but she was pushed out of their lives, probably threatened on some level.
Jesus, these magazine covers are embarrassingly photoshopped to the point of messing up the body/head proportions, if they are going to photoshop the hell out of every cover at least couldn’t they find someone who does this properly, I mean they can afford the bests. But the NEVER do it, they just keep on serving the world with the most unnatural pics that doesn’t even do any favors to the models/actresses/etc…they make them look like monsters!
So true. I think the problem is, when you spend hours and hours retouching and manipulating photos, you develop kind of a “body dysmorphia” towards them, it gets harder to tell how much is enough and what looks good, natural, etc. But it’s easy enough to deal with, just mirror the damn photo before you send it in. The retouchers of these top magazines probably think they are too faultless to bother checking their work though, and the chiefs probably don’t give a cr*p as long as nobody looks fat or wrinkly.
Looks like her face has settled from the latest rounds of tinkering. She is still very beautiful, though I think going (back) to a deeper red would make her pop. Kidman never looked better than when she had her Satine hue.
What she fails to realise about the absence of paps outside her house during the TC years was the fact that he had a scary publicist who controlled the media around him. No publication dared publish a pap photo of TC, and by extension NK, without her sanction.
The internet has really freed media from super controlling publicists.
The cover shot is lit to high heaven to make her look alive, but I will never for the life of me understand why she and whoever styles her – be it for red carpet, or this photo shoot, go out of their way to work against her natural skin tone and features. That second washed out shot of a generic vanilla looking blonde is so anemic and lifeless when you think of how she looked when she didn’t work against her natural beauty. Even in an old shot like this where the colours aren’t the best, the contrast of her hair and eyes is so striking:
https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/120260252525193503/
I dunno, as fellow reddish head curly type I just don’t get her obsession with trying to look like every other blonde in Hollywood. She will never openly bash Scientology because I think she hopes some day her kids will wake up and smell the roses.
To look at that old photo and then back at the current shots is incredibly shocking.
I know, right?! To me the plastic surgery is really only half of the equation, she just has rejected everything about her natural beauty in terms of hair colouring and wardrobe, which in her youth she knew how to accentuate, Which I don’t get, you always look your best when you work with nature as opposed to against it imo.
I read somewhere that because she has significant amounts of gray hair that it’s too hard to maintain the red.
Avatar probably had less CGI than that Vogue cover of hers.
How can she work so much? Go look her IMDb page and compare it to other star’s pages… And now she is doing a play in London?
Anyway she looks nice but I agree with Kaiser that her fashion is not that special. And this cover is pretty boring and I do not think the public is that interested in her anymore, her films do not do that well. Or maybe she just chooses wrong projects.
Wow, someone seriously botched her lips with the liquify tool on that cover. The corners of her mouth don’t even point in the same direction.
‘The wanting mind, Nicole.
Shut it down.’” Shut it down.
Already the lyrics of a song she may need to heed.
I’ve always been sort of whatever about her and her “beauty” (possibly bc people used to say we looked alike, back when both of us were younger, which i never really agreed with, but didn’t argue about either), but that pic of her in the desert with the suit on–I assume for the movie discussed–is gorgeous!
Funny because this is the one time her face looks fine for me in years. I’ll never knock her as an actress though and really interested in Gertrude Bell’s story. I think women in Hollywood definitely get scrutinized harsher than men for doing the same amount of work but Nicole has been under scrutiny about her looks from when she was in her twenties. She had red curly unruly hair with an odd face and every film i remember her commenting on the criticism she got for her looks. I think only now do critics and bloggers notice her botox work but go back, she was beautiful when she started and i think was never happy or accepted for her looks.
is anyone else curious about her comment on having more children? she said she wishes she had met him earlier so she could have more children – yet – she adopted with tom cruise. maybe i’m projecting.
She had a miscarriage early on in the marriage with TC so they decided to adopt. That was around the time rumours of a genetic condition Tom may have started to circulate. One of the side-effects of this alleged condition is that a fetus carrying the gene may spontaneously miscarry. She had another miscarriage at the end of their marriage as well.
She looks like a young Laura Linney in the 1st photo and Rosamund Pike in the 2nd.
It’s the back that is weirding me out the most. Just so odd.
The pic with the roses is just stunning. Gosh.
She looks like my socialite aunt so I kind of have a soft spot for her but that article made my head hurt. Not much said but still a mess of information.
There is a nice little film of Nicole at her farm to go with the interview at Vogue.com. She looks quite lovely to me, and more natural than I would have expected. I did like her better as a redhead with long curly hair all those years ago. But I think she just had to go shorter because her hair is thinning with age. And she decided to go blonde to hide the gray (red is a much more difficult color to get right). The choices are understandable considering the circumstances and at least the length flatters her.
Just like some others here, I have a weak spot for Nicole, even though she gets on my nerves sometimes. She strikes me as someone who struggles with her own perfectionism, but who also has good intentions and who is basically kind at heart.
Thanks. I went and looked at the clip. I love her home in Australia. It’s actually a very comfy home, not stuffy. And her land is stunning when they go outside and love the little cottage out back. I had no idea she had a farm in Australia with cows and chickens and alpacas.
I love these light-hearted, cheeky Vogue clips where they follow the person through their home while shooting out questions. Nicole’s white dress is gorgeous on her, and she does look much better these days, smaller lips and face thinner.
I loved the Vogue clip I saw a while back they did following Sienna Miller through her house in England also She was funny.
Yes, they are nice those interviews, I saw the one with Sarah Jessica Parker which I loved!
@Calcifer, I loved the Sarah Jessica Parker one, too.
Just. Not. Buying It.
At her divorce, Kidman had the time, health and money to march a phalanx of angry lawyers into Family Court and demand her two children, to fight for them. She didn’t, and that tells us all we need to know. She should have done everything possible to get those kids away from CoS–just like Katie did. Kidman abandoned those kids, and they turned on her. Not because of Xenu but because they had been abandoned by her. They’re older now but still not ready to bury the hatchet: they refused to attend her dad’s funeral last year.
It’s not CoS talking, it’s them. It’s their decisions as adults.
She didn’t abandoned her older kids. She actually saw them a lot until around the time Tom married Katie and she was replaced by Katie as their mom. Their was an interview were Katie was more then happy brag about how she was there mother and how they called her mom.
You have know idea what went on with their divorce proceedings so how can you say she didn’t fight for them?
Hate to tell you this CoS member don’t have free will they do what the church tells them to do or face the consequences, but then again if you know more about how CoS works you would know that.
Katie blindsided Tom, that’s how she managed it. With Nicole, she was the one blindsided.
She’d spent most of the marriage just doing a film here or there, but then she went off to film Moulin Rouge/The Others back to back with Tom’s encouragement. Tom stayed in LA with the children. During their marriage Tom had actually been dipping in and out of Scientology, but he went back to it in a big way while she was gone. It was during that time that the children were taken out of school and started being home-schooled. Tom made sure to visit her rather than her visiting them, so it’s quite possible she didn’t see the extent of what was happening.
When he divorced her, she was stunned and depressed, and still had to finish her work. At that point Tom had been the primary caregiver for over a year (really his sister was though) and the kids were pretty deep into Scientology, and old enough to express a preference for which parent they wanted to stay with.
She did have shared custody for a while. That gradually got less and less, and by the time she realised what was happening, the kids were old enough to say they wanted to live in LA with their dad.
It’s easy to say she should have gotten them out of the cult, but at the time Scientology wasn’t such a well-known thing. There were people trying to expose it, but it was a fringe interest. Most ordinary people just accepted it as a weird church, but saw nothing sinister in it. It wasn’t til 2005 when Cruise went too far talking publicly about it that information about the darker side of it really started spreading into the mainstream. In 2001 Kidman wouldn’t have had the huge public support Katie did, because Scientology was viewed very differently.
It’s also possible she didn’t see it as a huge problem at first. Tom hadn’t been that involved in it for much of their marriage, she’d been audited and such but hadn’t made it far up ‘the Bridge’, so she didn’t have great personal knowledge of the cult. Her experience was of Tom dipping his toes in for a while then retreating, so she likely wasted time waiting for that to happen once again. When it didn’t, it was too late.
Thanks for your well-reasoned words Jessica. Nicole had probably been through one or more auditing sessions during her marriage to Tom and Co$ would have been more than happy to share them with the world had she made a stink about having equal time with Connor and Isabella. Both kids were deeply enough into Co$ at the time to see her as an SP, and would have gradually cut her off as their inculcation got deeper and deeper. Finally, a friend of mine who had a condo in downtown Toronto where a major film studio also had a penthouse suite for visiting celebrities once saw her and an assistant getting onto the private elevator in tears shortly after the divorce announcement and she was saying something like “if anyone finds out my career is over”. Wonder what that was all about??
@Triple Cardinal Maybe you are being too harsh. Don’t forget it was probably Tom Cruise who decided to pull the plug on his marriage to Nicole. There may have been trouble in their relationship for a while, but I think she was blindsided by his radical decision to end it. I think she was also stunned with grief for a while (I remember her telling in an interview that she couldn’t get out of bed some days because she was feeling so destroyed – she did get up of course, for her children, but it shows what condition she was in). At the same time, she might not have foreseen how completely Tom was going to distance the children from her, something which happened gradually. Katie Holmes on the other hand had the benefit of knowing all this from Nicole’s example and she could plan her exit more strategically as well as how to keep Suri with her.
I think she was blindsided, too, and why wouldn’t she be? I expect most reasonable people would never expect their husband to behave with the ruthless disregard he showed for her. I’m glad she has the opportunity now to enjoy the family life she’s longed for.
I thought she was Julianne Hough in the header pic (2nd photo in the post).
The shot from ‘Queen of the Desert’ reminds me of Candice Bergen in ‘The Wind and The Lion’ I hope this movie is as good as that one was.
Nicole has a habit of hiding things and has proven to be a liar.