Don’t you just love it when magazines get all literal with their headlines? Vanity Fair‘s upcoming October cover reads “Nicole Kidman Bares All” and is illustrated by a photo of Nicole Kidman baring all she can bare in a magazine that doesn’t come shipped in a brown paper sleeve. With skin so milky you feel like grabbing for the Cheerios, Nicole’s cover accompanies an article in which the 40-year-old actress talks candidly about her former husband Tom Cruise and her current husband Keith Urban.
Among the revelations are that she had a miscarriage early in her marriage to Cruise, was briefly engaged (to an unnamed suitor) after her divorce and “yearns” to have a baby with Urban. She also talks about her emptiness the night she won her 2003 Best Actress Oscar: “It felt big. It felt lonely and big. You’re in a hotel and you’re like, okay well, I’m sitting in this big suite with an Oscar, and I still don’t have a life. What is wrong with me? It hit home that I needed to get a life. Who do I jump on the bed with, and celebrate with, and order pancakes with?”
Not to quibble, but — uh — she just won an Oscar; clearly she had a life. And a very successful one at that. What she didn’t have was a love life. Those are two very different things. Must successful women reduce themselves to that old yarn about their lives not being complete without a man partner? Ugh. And isn’t it just a little weird that Vanity Fair chose to shoot Nicole in a near-mirror of the baby-in-a-jacket pose they put her ex in?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been impressed with Nicole’s work since Flirting, and impressed grew to damn impressed after To Die For, The Others and The Hours. Sure, she has had some duds of late (I believe sitting through both The Stepford Wives and Bewitched qualifies as cruel and unusual punishment under the Geneva Conventions.) But I’m still willing to give her three new films coming out this year (The Invasion, Margot at the Wedding and The Golden Compass) a chance.
Though, as long as we’re quibbling, did anyone else look at the Vanity Fair cover and think, “Hey, why is Evan Rachel Wood wearing a captain’s hat and showing me her bra?”
