Nicole Kidman

Nicole Kidman was born in Honolulu in 1967, while her Australian parents were in the United States on student visas, and grew up on Sydney’s North Shore. She started ballet at three. As a child she was very shy and had a stutter. Her film career began in Australia in 1983 with BMX Bandits, and her breakthrough came in 1989 with Dead Calm.

Hollywood followed. In Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995) she played a young woman obsessed with TV fame. Jane Campion, also at Lady Gallery, gave her the lead in The Portrait of a Lady (1996). In 2001 she sang and danced through Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!.

The turning point was The Hours (2002), alongside Meryl Streep. To play Virginia Woolf in 1920s England she wore a prosthetic nose that made her hard to recognise, and she won the Oscar for Best Actress. She has also gone back to the London stage: in 1998 in David Hare’s The Blue Room, and in 2015 in Photograph 51, as the scientist Rosalind Franklin.

Start with The Hours, then watch Big Little Lies, the series she produced and starred in, which won her two Emmys, as producer and as lead actress.