AustLit logo

AustLit

Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Nicole Kidman : Transformation and the Business of Acting
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Critical reception and repeated erasures Celebrity discourses and the construction of the star performer have been significantly fashioned by actresses, as theatre and film scholars have argued.1 Australian-American, Nicole Kidman, born in 1967, one of the highest paid actresses in the world and named as one of the top 100 most influential women in the world in 2018 and 2019, has generated her own celebrity industry with some striking particularities and risks in her career choices.2 She has knowingly drawn on the iconicity of celebrity performers from the Hollywood golden age, yet cleverly turned the chameleonic and unexpected into important aspects of her professional brand. In a recent essay, I have argued that intellectual acuity, shrewd business sense, strategic decision-making and agency have been effaced in theatre history and that memoir and biographical accounts of actresses all too often follow a familiar pattern that prefers the marginalisation of artistic craft, managerial excellence and commercial flair - as though the sagacious cultivation of a professional career might somehow do injury to an actress's professional persona.3 Kidman has suffered from these negative frames to an extreme degree. Male star studies theorists, such as Richard Dyer and David Thomson, have foregrounded discourses of desire that focus on spectator fantasy at the expense of an actress's acting prowess and agency.4 Kidman's glamorous sexual allure has famously dazzled influential cultural commentators (usually white and male) to such an extent that a prevalent construct of her acting technique is that it depends on a projection of herself as a beautiful but empty vessel in order to best accommodate viewer fantasy. To cite a few telling examples: 'Nicole may be an enquiring mind ... but she is a cover girl too'; 'intelligence muffles instinct and spontaneity because it shadows true acting'; 'She doesn't let herself be seen pondering or calculating. Because then if you make a mistake, you can begin to look foolish'; 'She knows how far she relies on stupid luck.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australasian Drama Studies no. 75 October 2019 18496337 2019 periodical issue

    'Papers, presentations and workshops ranged across many subjects, including: individual performers and practices; dramaturgies of acting, technology, disability and access; rehearsal and hierarchies of power; acting and ethics; women in the acting and performance industries; diversity on the stage; mainstream and independent work; comedy; physical practices; and wellbeing and mental health. Actresses have been particularly vocal about the need to challenge the gender pay gap, sexism, racism and male abuse of power, and there is a noticeable difference in the numbers of actresses of all ages who are prepared to speak out about the invisibility and marginalisation that too many have endured. The different moods of the actresses in these articles and interviews are also striking: the optimism and celebratory notes evident in Trevor Jones's piece on women performers of musical theatre and the joyously comic anarchy manifest in Sarah Peters' article on the Travelling Sisters are not, for example, sounded by Candy Bowers, who describes a landscape of white supremacy and 'the centring of whiteness' above all, and identifies a major problem with diversity and access to training as well as an unwillingness to celebrate intersectionality and diverse storytelling on Australian stages. Forsyth observes that many women turn to film and television not just because of financial issues and the limited roles that mature actresses are offered on the stage, but also because of the physical wear and tear on the body and mind.' (Mary Lockhurst, Editorial abstract)

    2019
    pg. 73-100
Last amended 7 Jan 2020 13:47:17
73-100 Nicole Kidman : Transformation and the Business of Actingsmall AustLit logo Australasian Drama Studies
X