Nicole Kidman has said that 2014 has been a really hard year. Speaking at the Australian premiere of “Paddington” in Sydney, the actor said it felt good to close out the year with a film that makes people smile, following the grief of losing her father, Australian clinical psychologist Antony Kidman, to a heart attack in August.
“Personally [it’s been] really really really hard,” she told Guardian Australia. “My family underwent a massive tragedy. So not my favourite year. But I try not to be ungrateful – I’m grateful to be alive.”
It has been a mixed year for Kidman on screen, too, with Oliver Dahan’s biopic “Grace of Monaco” critically panned in February, but “Paddington” topping the UK box office after universally warm reviews. The film is released in Australia on 11 December and in January in the US.
“My whole career is always a roller-coaster,” she said on the red carpet. “I’m so random and spontaneous and unusual in my choices – I never expect anything.”
Kidman, who has two daughters with her husband, Australian country music singer, Keith Urban, and an adopted son and daughter with former partner Tom Cruise, said: “I hadn’t made a film that had made people feel good for a long time. I’d made films that are darker in tone. So, it’s really nice to be able to make a film where you can say: “yeah, bring your kids’.”
The Oscar-winning actor is set for a busy 2015, starring opposite Robert Pattinson in Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert and opposite Hugo Weaving and Joseph Fiennes in the Sundance-bound Strangerland, by Australian director Kim Farrant in her feature debut.
