Culture Slut: Nicole Kidman is the Last True Film Star
Another Met Gala has rolled around and another crop of celebrities have attempted to impress the world with their sartorial prowess - some successfully, and some less so. This year’s theme was a tribute to the career of Karl Lagerfeld, a figure who WAS the fashion industry for so long, but so many of whose recent comments were bad takes. I mean, who would have thought that someone who reigned supreme during the years of original supermodels, heroin chic and the Weight Watchers era could possibly be fatphobic? Personally, I was very disappointed that Chanel West Coast wasn’t there in her sexified Karl Lagerfeld look from her hit song ‘KARL, but not all of one’s dreams can come true. But do you know who was there? Nicole Kidman, and that’s the only person I care about today. She used a unique blend of memory, mystery and modernity, fused with her own star persona, to create a truly emotional moment of camp euphoria.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit how much time I’ve spent thinking about the 2019 Met Gala Camp: Notes on Fashion. A truly great theme that proved notoriously tricky for the stars (or, more accurately, their stylists) to interpret, probably due to the distinctly American trait of not being able to differentiate between camp and campy.
I still think about who gets it and who doesn’t and I still think about how Joan Collins was the only truly camp person there, just by virtue of her being Joan Collins in a fantastic Valentino ball gown. I still think about how much I didn’t like Gaga’s self indulgent posturing, and how Karlie Kloss “looked camp right in the eye” and apparently went blind. I still think about what I would have worn if I had gone (lots of white lace, strings of pearls, impenetrable sunglasses and white lace parasol, an ode to Elizabeth Taylor in camp opus Boom! (1968)). One of my first columns was examining the notion of camp tragedy and relating that to the life of Tallulah Bankhead, a star that shone so brightly that her true essence was never able to be truly captured, which this brings me to the subject of this column: being a real movie star.
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Nicole Kidman is a real movie star. She is possibly the only movie star left. She arrived in the beautiful pale pink Chanel gown she wore for the iconic Chanel No 5 commercial directed by Baz Luhrmann some twenty years previously, and she was an absolute vision. The effect was both nostalgic and poignant, mystery in modernity, which I would argue is very much part of the Nicole Kidman persona, and also a key element to camp success. She slips in and out of time in her films, equally at home in period costume or contemporary dress. She is reminiscent of old legends, of frosty Hitchcock blondes and the acceptable kind of exotic white women. One of Tallulah’s great tragedies was that audiences didn’t allow her the same kind of sexual liberty and agency afforded to Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo because she was American through and through, an good old American girl, not a foreign import capable of untold glamour and seduction. Nicole Kidman continues in this vein of exoticised white women by virtue of her being Australian. It gives her an air of mystery to American audiences without being too confronting. She is, after all, still white, blonde (usually) and speaking in English, but Hollywood hasn’t been known for its wild variety of stars.
I come from the old school gay practice of idolising the leading ladies of cinema, from its inception to now. I think of Lilian Gish and Theda Bara, the angel and devil of the silent era, one a strikingly fragile but expressive cherub; the other the original vamp, dark sex symbol and villainess. I think of the incomparable Greta Garbo, an untouchable goddess who suffered so beautifully on screen for us. I think of Mae West and Marlene Dietrich, powerful agents of sexual autonomy and empowerment laced with queer aesthetics. I think of Judy Garland who gave voice to our innermost emotions and untapped wells of resistance, the seductive Rita Hayworth who danced in and out of our dreams, her cigarette tracing a ladder to the stars. I think of Elizabeth Taylor with her mutant eyes (naturally violet and framed with a double layer of lashes, a beautiful freak of nature), Bette Davis commanding every stage she deigned to step on, Katherine Hepburn’s strength and resilience tinged with pathos. I think of Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, blonde bombshells with tragic ends. I think of the Hitchcock blondes; Kim Novak, Grace Kelly, Tippi Hedren, Janet Leigh and the icy allure of their studied glamour. I think of Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, Jodie Foster and Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep and Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gina Gershon. And now? Now there is only one person that I think of as a film star, in the truest sense of the word, and that is Nicole Kidman.
After the Hollywood studio system broke apart in the 1950s and 60s, the nature of movie stardom changed. In reeling off this list, I found it hard to immediately think of stars I love from the 1970s. A quick Google search shows mostly male stars, which feels very different to previous decades. Stardom is feminine. In the words of Quentin Crisp: “When I was young, the world was very feminine. The words ‘Movie Star’ meant a woman, except perhaps Valentino, but even his appeal was very feminine. He was cruel, capricious.”
“Nicole Kidman is cinema. Nicole Kidman is the silver screen. Nicole Kidman is the last film star. Even heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”
The 70s saw a rise in male leads and a decline in traditional glamour, which quickly meant there were less female movie stars. The ones that did rise in this era, Olivia Newton John, Barbara Streisand, Cher, Liza Minelli, all had massively successful recording careers outside of their acting, showing they had to have more cross-appeal than their predecessors. This has continued into the 80s and beyond, now in the 2010s and 2020s, actresses are celebrities with dedicated social media teams bent on helping them seem approachable and relatable. Jennifer Lawrence was the zenith of this, the press strategy behind her seemingly trying to strip her of any mystique whatsoever to make her the goofy girl next door who just wants to eat pizza and wear sweatpants. Actors are made to answer questions about memes and internet culture in order to convince us that we are the same as them. I can’t tell you in visceral enough detail about the spasms of utter revulsion I experienced watching Taron Egerton confusedly reading out thirst tweets about his bussy, but I can say it is something no one should ever have to confront.
But Nicole Kidman. Nicole Kidman is different. I definitely think of her as the last true film star. She’s mysterious. You can’t say her name without saying all of it, same as Elizabeth Taylor or Mae West. She is the only actress working today that I could imagine Hitchcock would cast in one of his masterful thrillers. (I swear to god if any of you say Gaga I will scream). She is a presence. She is a vibration. She is a feeling in the atmosphere. She has managed to maintain her aura of mystery for decades at this point. The only time we were let into her personal human drama was in her divorce from Tom Cruise, which is sufficiently far back in the past for it not to demystify her current stardom.
For years we knew nothing about the way she lived, or really with who. She could have been a cannibal, living off the flesh (bones and all) of lost tourists on her Australian ranch. She is one of those stars we can imagine living half in the world of their films, half in our own imaginations. I picture her lying back on her terrace in a white gown like a Victorian consumptive, picking her teeth with a human bone and looking pale. Is she even human? No, she is a goddess, a screen goddess.
Nicole Kidman can do anything in this world. She is the ideal type for the 1940s film studios, and her colouring is not the only thing tying her to icons like Mae West and Dietrich. For years, there were quiet rumblings on the internet and in gossip rags that Nicole Kidman was not a cis woman, that she was stealth trans, or possibly intersex (I’m putting this in the contemporary phrasing, at the time it was in much more colourful language), all centred on the facts that she was tall, thin, very glamorous and had not produced any naturally born children (back then). Very ridiculous things to base rumours off of, but it has always been part of the industry.
In the 1940s, people thought that Marlene must be a true androgyne, both masculine and feminine, seductive to everyone who saw her and an enemy of traditional gender roles. In the 30s they swore that someone as sexy as Mae West could not possibly be a “natural woman”, her excessive sexual prowess being unnatural for real ladies. Such an empowered degenerate must be part man at the very least. Questions about Mae West’s sex were ignited again after she died when the now departed Raquel Welch made a passing joke that Mae was in fact “a dock worker in drag”. Nicole Kidman joins this litany of stars whose glamour was so unquantifiable that they couldn’t be real women
I remember after the release of Moulin Rouge, the film that catapulted her to superstardom, she made an appearance on a Robbie Williams song, his cover of Frank Sinatra’s Something Stupid. Williams was one of the biggest stars in the UK at the time, and when he appeared on Top of the Pops to perform we all waited with baited breath for Nicole Kidman to appear. But she didn’t. Instead, a close up of her face swam into focus on a screen behind him, and she delivered her side of the song from there, alternatively looking earnestly coquettish, and then fixing us all with seductive bedroom eyes. She was not a human woman, she was not confined to a body like the rest of us. She WAS the screen. Williams and his appeal was about relatability - he was the boy we all knew, the cheeky chap from down the road who hit it big and became a megastar - but Nicole Kidman was on a different plane of existence, higher even than we plebs could dare to dream. Her true form is not based in flesh and blood, that is just how she is expressed. Nicole Kidman is cinema. Nicole Kidman is the silver screen. Nicole Kidman is the last film star. Even heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
Words: Misha MN
