Nicole Kidman

David Thomson has taught film studies at Dartmouth College and served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival. The author also ofiShowman: The Life of David O. Selznick,/ihe is a regular contributor toiThe New York Times, The Nation, Movieline, The New Republic,/iandiSalon./iHe lives with his family in San Francisco.Chapter 1brbrStrangersbrbrbrI am talking to an Australian, a woman, about Nicole Kidman, and the crucial mystery is there at the start: "I've known her twenty years, and I've spent a staggering amount of time with her, but I feel I don't know her. Because what she gives you is what you want. A lot of actors are like that. They don't exist when they aren't playing a part."brbrThis book is about acting and about an actress, but it must also study what happens to anyone beholding an actress-the spectator, the audience, or ourselves in any of our voyeur roles. And the most important thing in that vexed transaction is the way the actress and the spectator must remain strangers. That's how the magic works. Without that guarantee, the dangers of "relationship" are grisly and absurd-they range from illicit touching to murder. For there cannot be this pitch of irrational desire without that rigorous apartness, provided by a hundred feet of warm space in a theater, and by that astonishing human invention, the screen, at the movies. And just as the movies were never simply an art or a show, a drama or narrative, but the manifestation of desire, so the screen is both barrier and open sesame.brbrThe thing that permits witness-seeing her, being so intimate-is also the outline of a prison.brbrThis predicament reminds me of a moment iniCitizen Kane/i. The reporter, Thompson, goes to visit Bernstein, an old man who was Charlie Kane's right-hand man and who is now chairman