Nicole Kidman has been an international treasure going on four decades. Whether you’re tracking her many wigs (“The Undoing” is our favorite), admiring her textured and committed performances, or just standing up and saluting before every AMC Theatres showing, you’re probably honoring her in some way.
While five best actress Oscar nominations and one win (for “The Hours”) have been adequate markers of her success and endurance, conversations have been brewing for years about a lack of recognition for her remarkable artistic consistency.
“How many times does Nicole Kidman have to prove herself?” asked author Anne Helen Peterson in a 2017 essay for BuzzFeed, one that examined how esteem is or isn’t doled out to women in Hollywood, using Kidman as a template.
“While male actors coast on the brilliance of a single performance for years, female stars have to reapply for greatness on a yearly basis, fighting the industry-wide impulse for gossip about their personal lives and their appearances to subsume substantial conversation about their ability,” Peterson wrote nearly 10 years ago, on the heels of the runaway hit first season of “Big Little Lies,” starring Kidman.
After a 2023 delay due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, the American Film Institute hopes to correct this cultural error by handing Kidman its Life Achievement Award Saturday. Broadcast on TNT, the tribute makes for glorious cinema pageantry, sitting our film idols on a dais and trotting out an army of famous faces to pay tribute to them in between movie clips.
AFI president Bob Gazzale, who wrote the upcoming Kidman show and serves as executive producer, watched roughly 80 films and series from the actor’s archive in an effort to capture her versatility. Only with Kidman do you get “The Stepford Wives” remake next to an adaptation of Phillip Roth’s “The Human Stain.” Or Gus Van Sant’s “To Die For” along with Adam Sandler’s “Just Go With It.” Or Jonathan Glazer’s criminally underrated “Birth” alongside the campy “Batman Forever.”
Gazzale caught up with Variety to discuss his grand plans for Kidman, offer a look inside AFI’s selection process and tease some surprises in store.
There are so few formats like the Life Achievement Award on live television now. We’ve moved away from this kind of thing thanks to social media and how video moves now. So why Nicole Kidman, and why now?
In the long and proud tradition of this award, Nicole embodies the glamour and the romance of Hollywood past. But she also has the daring and the bravery of one of this art form’s great character actors. She’s a true screen icon, but she’s also a risk-taker. Each performance is something new and something profound.
— Variety
