Do we like Nicole Kidman?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harmful words or company turned up, and years of work for women and good causes sit against one clumsy 2017 interview.
Nicole Kidman is the Australian-American actress who won the Best Actress Oscar for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours. That's the headline, but the more interesting thread is what she did with the clout afterwards. She has spent two decades turning fame into something useful for other people.
The nearest thing to a scandal in her past is a tabloid one, and she was the wronged party. In 2003 she accepted an apology and undisclosed damages from the publisher of The Sun over a story implying an affair. The paper accepted the claims were false, and she said she'd give the damages from that case and an earlier Daily Mail settlement to a charity for abandoned children in Romania. A tabloid pays you off and you hand it to kids: that's the whole saga.
On the harm check, we found nothing nasty. We found no anti-trans or anti-gay remarks, no conspiracy rabbit holes, no dodgy co-stars, and no campaigning against anyone's rights. The one political wobble was in January 2017. She told the BBC that Americans should support whoever the president is, and some people called for a boycott. She said she was only trying to say she believed in democracy and the Constitution, and then moved on.
The good stuff is the real stuff. In 2017 she vowed to work with a woman director every 18 months, and by May 2025 she had worked on 27 projects by female directors as an actor or producer. Cannes gave her its Women in Motion Award that year. Plenty of stars say the right thing, and she did the hiring.
The money matches the talk. In December 2018, as a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, she pledged half a million dollars to the UN Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women. She made the pledge on Human Rights Day, which was also her late father's birthday.
Nothing fresh and fiery has turned up lately. The big public moment this year was her March interview with Variety about her divorce from Keith Urban. She kept the details private, saying she doesn't discuss everything else out of respect. For a woman whose private life gets picked over daily, that restraint is a decent look.