Nicole Kidman's Hawaiian name was inspired by a baby elephant
Nicole Kidman was born in Honolulu to Australian students and given the Hawaiian name Hōkūlani, heavenly star, after a young elephant born at the city zoo around then. The shy child with a stutter grew into an Oscar winner who has ranked among the best-paid actresses since the late 1990s.
Kidman arrived on 20 June 1967 while her parents were in the United States on student visas; her father, Antony, was a biochemist and psychologist doing graduate work at the University of Hawaii. The accident of birthplace gave her dual Australian and American citizenship. The family lived in Washington, where her parents joined protests against the Vietnam War, and returned to Australia three years later, settling in Longueville on Sydney's Lower North Shore. She started ballet at three.
Watching Margaret Hamilton's Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz first made her want to act. She has described herself as painfully shy and says she stammered as a child. Drama and mime became a refuge, and her pale skin and red hair kept her rehearsing indoors, out of the sun. She left high school to act full time and made her screen debut at 16 in a 1983 remake of Bush Christmas. When her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1984, Kidman paused her career and trained in massage therapy to help with her recovery.
Dead Calm in 1989, opposite Sam Neill and Billy Zane, was her breakthrough, and Days of Thunder in 1990, beside future husband Tom Cruise, made her an international star. She won a Golden Globe for the dark comedy To Die For, playing a scheming newscaster, and made Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick's final film, with Cruise in 1999. After their divorce came Moulin Rouge! and The Others, a haunted-house story that grossed more than $210 million.
The Academy Award arrived for her Virginia Woolf in The Hours. On television, Big Little Lies won her two Emmys. She has been a UNICEF goodwill ambassador since 1994, founded Blossom Films in 2010, and in 2024 became the first Australian actor given the AFI Life Achievement Award.
Source: Nicole Kidman
