NICOLE KIDMAN
Daily Telegraph -November 2007

Along with cardigans and bad acting, privacy has been one of the great themes of Nicole Kidman's life.

Until this week, that is, when she was finally forced out of her cloister, blinking into the sunlight, to give evidence against a paparazzi photographer accused of stalking her.

This can't have been easy for a person as private as Nicole. I mean: how would you feel if only days after you appeared in the media talking about your miscarriages you had to appear in court, reliving the terrifying ordeal of being photographed in your car?

Just thinking about it makes me feel violated.

Privacy has not always come easily to Nicole Kidman. Her struggle began when she innocently married a Hollywood megastar who thinks that there are dead aliens in volcanos and psychiatry is evil. Doing their best to keep the passionate affair a secret, the newlyweds embarked on almost 10 years of worldwide publicity before finally calling it quits.

Tired of spending almost a decade ignoring the fact her husband was barking mad and repulsed by the empty celebrity life, “our Nic” decided to get serious. So she made The Hours and won an Academy Award by wearing a rubber nose and a straw hat - in Hollywood this is called “acting”.

Yet, despite outward appearances, there was still something missing, a hole in her heart that no percentage of her $200 million-dollar fortune could fill.
Tired of looking for love in all the wrong places and realising none of her films were making any money, Nicole needed a simpler, quieter relationship without all the fuss of celebrity scandal - so she dated Lenny Kravitz before marrying Keith Urban, Grammy-nominated country star with a serious drug and alcohol problem.
Since then, in between her husband's bouts of rehab and tell-all stripper exposes, Nicole somehow managed to continue making bad movies and appear in Vanity Fair looking wan and fragile. Seriously, what does she have to do before everyone will just leave her alone?

I for one am sick and tired of the indignities that have been foisted upon Nicole Kidman. It's time for us to take a stand, to say enough is enough. After all, isn't she just a human being like the rest of rest of us?

A really, really famous human being whose head regularly appears in billboard sizes on movie screens across the world? A human being who was paid almost five million bucks to do a three-minute perfume commercial? A human being who will, apparently, tell us anything we want to know about her except cool stuff like how crazy Tom Cruise really is?

Nicole Kidman is a self-professed “artist” and should be treated as such - ie, left to labour away in obscurity and poverty. Maybe then she will finally find the happiness she craves.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008