This year, Nicole Kidman marked her 40th birthday, celebrated the first anniversary of her marriage to country-music star Keith Urban, and took her daughter, Bella, to get blue hair—while working on a wide range of movies, both big-studio (The Invasion and next year’s Australia) and art-house (November’s Margot at the Wedding). At her home in Sydney, she fills in Krista Smith on a life of contrasts, including Urban’s post-nuptial stint in rehab, her desire for a child with him, and finding happiness in the now.

‘It felt big. It felt lonely and big.” Nicole Kidman is sitting at the dining-room table of her home in Darling Point, Sydney, describing her feelings upon winning the 2003 best-actress Oscar, for The Hours. “You’re in a hotel and you’re like, O.K., 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,” she says with her lilting laugh. “Who do I jump on the bed with, and celebrate with, and order pancakes with? That was painful, not having that person to share it with. That’s why it was more for my mom and dad and my kids. But even the kids were young enough that they were like, ‘Oh, cool. Over. Move on. Not interested.’”

Standing almost six feet tall, dressed in jeans and a thick gray sweater, the actress, a beauty on-screen, looks even better scrubbed clean and makeup-free. But she’s remarkably warm and approachable. Her home, comfortable and devoid of any movie-star excess, offers gorgeous views of the boats on Double Bay, which she prefers to the windier Sydney Harbor. Russell Crowe, her friend of 20 years, lives just 10 minutes away, on the harbor in Woolloomooloo.

She has had this house since she was married to Tom Cruise, and she usually stays here for about 2 out of every 12 months. This year, however, she has been in her home country since May, filming Australia, an epic period piece, due out next fall, starring Hugh Jackman and directed by her longtime collaborator Baz Luhrmann.

As we roam about the house, I realize that Kidman is the most culturally solvent actress I’ve ever met. She can knowledgeably discuss any of the first-edition classics that fill her floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. And she personally acquired all the art on the walls: works by Fred Williams, Rosalie Gascoigne, Margaret Preston, Colin McCahon, Norman Lindsay, and Arthur Boyd, not to mention Robert Mapplethorpe and Man Ray.

Evidence of her husband, country musician Keith Urban, fills the house: guitar cases tucked into corners, a piano sharing space with a billiard table. There are wedding photos sprinkled here and there, and snapshots of Kidman and Cruise’s children, Bella, 14, and Connor, 12, line the fridge. Although she lives the gypsy lifestyle of an actor, Kidman lays down roots where she can. “You’re transient and you try to set up homes that reflect you,” she says. “It’s just something that happens as soon as you’re a parent.”

While the loneliness of 2003 seems to have dissipated, Kidman, by anyone’s account, has had a tumultuous year. She and Urban were married on June 25, 2006, in a fairy-tale wedding in front of more than 200 friends and relatives. Four months later, her new husband checked into the Betty Ford clinic for 90 days of rehab for alcohol abuse. No bride expects her vows to be tested so soon after saying, “I do.”

Still, behind that seemingly fragile, porcelain façade is a brave and determined woman. And Kidman is no stranger to public scrutiny of her personal life; it’s something she has had to endure since she married Cruise, at age 23. She and Urban chose to go public and acknowledge the relapse, and he issued a public statement saying that he was sorry for the pain he had caused those close to him—especially his wife. “You can try and hide it, smoke and mirrors and all, but then how do I visit every weekend?” she says. “It’s been a huge lesson for me too.”

The couple met at an Australian promotional event in Los Angeles in January 2005. “It wasn’t like the earth shook,” Kidman says, but within months they were seriously dating. “We were very, very quiet about it, and we managed to get through a long period of time without people knowing about us—which is pretty much our style still.” They were engaged before they made their first appearance together, at the Grammys in February 2006. She also waited until he had proposed to introduce him to her children.

When I ask what brought them together, Kidman says, “I think we were two lonely people. I would probably say that two very lonely people managed to meet at a time when they could open themselves to each other. We were a mixture of frightened and brave.”

Both were born in 1967, and they have since become two of Australia’s most famous exports. But their backgrounds couldn’t be more different. Kidman and her sister, Antonia, were raised in a liberal, intellectual household in Sydney. Urban grew up with two brothers on a farm in Queensland.

He went on to become the first country singer from Australia to sell more than 10 million albums. In 2005 he was named Entertainer of the Year at the Country Music Awards, and Kidman is sorry she wasn’t there to cheer him on. “I still want Keith to win another award,” she says. “I want to be there for him. I just go, ‘Baby, I have so much desire to sit and watch that.’”

This summer, I went to see Urban deliver an engaging and charismatic performance in Los Angeles, before a sold-out crowd at the Staples Center. He was dressed simply, in jeans and a T-shirt. On close inspection, I could make out the name NICOLE tattooed on his upper arm. Midway through the show, a fan held up a sign that read, KEITH, YOU CAN KISS MY WIFE, IF I CAN KISS YOURS! Urban smiled as he took the sign, read it aloud, and then handed it to Bella and Connor, who were in the audience. Then he descended into the crowd, planted a kiss on the woman’s cheek, and told her husband, “I’m not sure how you’re going to get your part of the bargain, brother.” The crowd erupted in laughter. Later, Urban introduced his song “Got It Right This Time” by saying, “My wife couldn’t be here tonight, but this song is dedicated to her, because I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that woman.”

Backstage after the concert, friends waited while Urban and his stepchildren spent nearly an hour on his tour bus talking on the phone with Kidman. He will be on the road through the end of the year, and he plans to fly to Australia every 10 days or so until she finishes filming with Luhrmann, in late October. “Two weeks is still too long for us [to be apart],” she says. “We like one week. We start to hurt after seven days.”

When it comes to talking about her husband, his rehab, and her role in it, Kidman is cautious. “I’ve learned an enormous amount having a relationship with someone who is in recovery,” she says. “I’m more than willing to walk it with him. The two of us are very committed to our relationship.” She grins and gives a resigned laugh. “It was just another twist in my life: Here it goes. Hold on, and off we go! But it was painful, deeply painful.” Her voice lowers. “We were in a very, very, very bad, painful place, and have managed to step through it, and I hope that gives some people some hope who may be in the same place. And that’s enough said. Anything else is overindulgent and unnecessary right now. And I think it jinxes it, in a way, and that’s why I don’t go on about my enormous feelings for this man.”

Kidman is vigilant about protecting those she loves, and wary of the pitfalls of fame—the lack of privacy and surplus of attention. “Trying to keep [Bella and Connor] out of all that until a certain age was very important, because how do you give balance otherwise? How do they find their moral compass when they’re surrounded by sycophantic people? That’s not a criticism of the industry. It’s just, when a child is put in a position of power, it doesn’t necessarily bode well. They don’t know how to use it. It meant not going to some things, but you still do everything else, and it means just protecting their world. It was hard.” Kidman herself had a traditional upbringing, and she acknowledges that it’s tough knowing that her kids are having such a different experience. “You feel like you’re failing a lot of the time,” she says.

Still, she resists the temptation to be overprotective. “They’re out and about,” she says as she potters about the kitchen, making a pot of coffee. “I took them to the Nickelodeon awards, because once they hit this age they’re so strong-willed. ‘Come on, we want to see it!’ And then it almost feels cruel not to go, ‘Hey, you’ve paid a lot having famous parents.’ As long as it’s balanced.”

For someone who has lived so much of her life away from her family, Kidman is part of a very tight clan. She is godmother to two of her sister’s four children. “No one is ever going to come between us,” she says of Antonia, a newscaster in Australia. “We used to have a secret language and all sorts of stuff. We need that love and support from each other, and we’re both willing to give it. She’s grown up all her life with a sister who’s an actress, and she’s been a part of it and held me in her arms when I’ve cried. She’s seen the failures and the successes, and I’ve seen hers, and we’ve both mapped this extraordinary camaraderie and love. And we’ve had to fight for it.”

I ask how she came to be such a young mother, and Kidman admits that she wanted to have children from the age of 17. She was 22 when she met Cruise, and “from the minute Tom and I were married, I wanted to have babies.” She pauses. “And we lost a baby early on, so that was really very traumatic. And that’s when it came that we would adopt Bella.” Cryptically, she adds, “There’s a complicated background to that, given that I never speak much about many things. One day maybe that story will be told. So that’s the way it came up, and we adopted Bella when I was 25. My mother has an adopted sister, so it’s been part of our family, and I knew it would probably play out somewhere in mine. I didn’t think it would happen so early, but it did.” Two years later, Kidman and Cruise adopted Connor.

Raised a Catholic, she remains one to this day. “It’s given me guidance,” she says. “I still abide by the Ten Commandments. I’m trying to have the richest life you can have and still hold yourself responsible. I don’t want to go to my deathbed with too much weighing on me. I just don’t have the nature for it, so I purge through my art, and luckily I’ve got a partner now that’s on the same sort of quest. We’re attuned.”

A well-worn copy of Mother Teresa’s The Joy in Loving sits on the kitchen table until Kidman pulls it away with an embarrassed laugh. “They’re always teasing me,” she says, referring to her kids. Bella once gave her a T-shirt for her birthday that said, EVERYBODY LOVES A CATHOLIC GIRL. “I mean, obviously my children are Scientologists, my ex-husband is a Scientologist,” she says. When I press her on the subject, she demurs: “I don’t want to be the one discussing Scientology.”

She’d rather talk about her children’s recent visit. “Bella and Connor love L.A., and who wouldn’t when you’re a kid?” she says. “But Connor had the most brilliant time here. He had his hands dirty, he was with the horses [on the set of Australia]. He never once picked up his PSP”—the portable video-game system. “I’m not a supporter of him being on that thing all the time,” she says.

Bella has her own ways of testing her mother. “I called Tom and said, ‘Guess what. Bella wants blue hair,’” Kidman recalls. Cruise didn’t object, so, she continues, “I go with my daughter to the hair salon to get it dyed blue, and I look at her and I think, My God, it’s cool! I always wanted to be a young parent. But now I might be a much older parent. I’m very excited about that prospect, too.”

Age has never been an asset in Hollywood. Bette Davis was playing a spinster by age 34, and Anne Bancroft was only 36 when she portrayed the archetypal older woman, Mrs. Robinson, in The Graduate. It’s gotten better, but not much.

Kidman, who turned 40 in June, acknowledges that “there are times when you go, ‘Gosh, I wish I could have played Nina in The Seagull.’” Still, she says, “I don’t measure life by youth. I think in terms of the grandeur of the journey. The only way you can understand things is through contrast, so you’ve got to have youth to have age. Give me sadness so I can have happiness.”

Throughout her career, she has worked hard not to be defined by her looks, and she has made a point of alternating between major studio movies and art-house pictures. “My commitment is to films that are about the human psyche, where you can delve into it and explore it and not make a judgment on it,” she says. “People behave in the most terrible ways and the most glorious ways, and I think your job as an artist is to illuminate those things.”

This year she hits both the big and the small categories. In August, Warner Bros. released The Invasion, starring Daniel Craig and directed by Germany’s Oliver Hirschbiegel, whose previous movie, Downfall, about Adolf Hitler’s final days, was nominated for the best-foreign-language-film Oscar in 2004. The Invasion is a remake of the 1956 horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. “The thing that appealed to me was that Oliver said, ‘I want to do it with no special effects,’” Kidman recalls, “and I loved Downfall, so I went, ‘O.K., how would you do that?’”

In November, Kidman will appear in Margot at the Wedding, directed by Noah Baumbach*.* She plays Margot, who disapproves of the man (Jack Black) who is about to marry her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh). “I’ve wanted to work with Nicole for a long time,” Leigh says. “She takes incredible risks, but in a very pure way. I felt like she made me better.” The movie, which makes its debut this month at the Toronto International Film Festival, was shot on a minimal budget, and Kidman earned scale wages of less than $1,000 a week—a far cry from her usual asking price of $17.5 million, which she received for Bewitched and The Interpreter, both in 2005.

The actress has a history of working with interesting directors on their follow-up features—Birth was Jonathan Glazer’s first film after Sexy Beast, Fur succeeded Secretary for Steven Shainberg, and The Others (Kidman’s biggest commercial hit) followed Open Your Eyes for Alejandro Amenábar. Her relationships with directors are intense, and mirror those in her personal life: if you’re willing to go there for her, she’ll go there for you. “I have to be coaxed as an actress, to be brought out of my shell,” she says. “I need to feel safe and be protected. But that’s probably my personality in general. I don’t do well being pushed and being told what I have to do. I do much better when someone’s very gentle.”

Margot at the Wedding comes on the heels of Noah Baumbach’s critically acclaimed breakout film, 2005’s The Squid and the Whale. “I had clearly written it for her without thinking about it,” says Baumbach, who originally called the script Nicole in the Country. “I wanted someone you would really identify with and connect to, and at the same time someone who would disappear into the part. I think she’s one of the best actors of her age range or period. She is completely alive in every take.”

“I just place myself completely in the director’s hands,” Kidman says, “so if I’m not willing to do that, I shouldn’t be in the movie. I love being under somebody’s control. I love being under a director’s control. I just do. I love it. And I love being there to help their vision. Stephen Daldry [The Hours], who’s another person that I just love, I’m always like, ‘Please, Stephen, cast me in something else’—because I want to be the center of his attention, you know? It’s a lovely place to be, creatively, helping someone put their ideas into the world.” Daldry recently obliged, casting her opposite Ralph Fiennes in The Reader, based on Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel.

For the moment, though, she is back to being the center of attention for Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann. “What makes Nicole so compelling,” he says, “is the risk and energy that she puts into evolving both as an actress and a human being.” He adds, “The professional relationship of director to actress requires an extraordinary level of trust and mutual support. At the same time you are at opposite ends of the spectrum heading towards what you hope is the highest possible artistic outcome. These qualities are not alien in a good friendship, and so to a certain extent our professional relationship and our friendship are intrinsically linked.”

This December, she will appear in The Golden Compass, a fantasy adventure based on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. New Line hopes that the film, adapted and directed by Chris Weitz (About a Boy), will expand into a Lord of the Rings-style franchise. Kidman has a supporting role as a sultry villainess, but she’ll become a central character should the series continue. The film pairs her for a second time with Daniel Craig, who has this to say: “We immediately liked each other, and we work well together. What can I tell you? She’s luminous. She’s Nicole Kidman. She’s just very good news.”

Kidman originally arrived in Hollywood as a young up-and-comer who had caught Tom Cruise’s eye with her performance in the Australian thriller Dead Calm. While filming Days of Thunder together, the pair started a relationship, and by the time the movie was released Cruise had divorced his first wife, Mimi Rogers. Six months later, he married Kidman. It was a development that threatened to stunt her career just as it was beginning.

“My agents told me, ‘Once you become Mrs. Tom Cruise, you do know your career is going to die,’” she recalls. “‘You’re going to absolutely shoot yourself in the foot.’ I was appalled. I was like, ‘Hello? I’m in love, and I don’t care if it’s shooting myself in the foot. I’d much rather be married and have a family.’ I just saw a guy who rides around on a motorbike and happens to be the biggest movie star in the world. But I was in love with him, which is why I think we lasted 11 1/2 years together. I have no regrets in that relationship.”

In February 2001, her world imploded when Cruise abruptly filed for divorce. She was blindsided and devastated by the end of her marriage. Six and a half years later, the public still wonders what happened. Ironically, the ensuing media frenzy coincided with her two biggest successes, Moulin Rouge! and The Others. “After I came out of it, you know, I was like, ‘O.K., what do I focus on now?’ And that’s when my career suddenly came together.” She received her first Oscar nomination, for Moulin Rouge!, and won over millions of Americans when she told David Letterman how refreshing it felt to be back in high heels. (Cruise is a good four inches shorter than his ex-wife.)

Since her breakup with Cruise, Kidman has made 12 films, some of which have been lackluster. “Part of that was avoidance,” says Kidman. “I’d love to say it was all creatively driven, but part of it was just ‘I don’t really have a life, so I’ll do it through this.’” She spent most of her time either on a set or with her children. “That was my choice and that’s what I wanted,” she says. “I slowly healed, and then I was able to come and say, ‘Here, this is what I have to offer.’”

Over time, Kidman was romantically linked with the rocker Lenny Kravitz and the movie producer Steve Bing, but she says she dated very little: “I didn’t really want a relationship. I just wanted my kids to have me, and I didn’t feel comfortable having some person in that small hubbub. And then I got engaged to somebody … but it just wasn’t right. I wasn’t ready. We weren’t ready.” I ask who this mystery fiancé was, but she declines to say. “I get engaged and I get married—that’s my thing,” she tells me. “I don’t want to date. I’m interested in a very, very deep connection.”

She continues: “I probably haven’t done the things that somebody else in my position would have done. The opportunities are extraordinary. I mean, many times I’ve chosen to go home to my hotel room and be alone, and that’s partly to do with shyness and it’s partly to do with fear, but I certainly have all of the desires and a very vivid imagination. Someone I read recently said, ‘Live a bourgeoisie life and do the rest in your art.’ I’ll take the risks, but in my art.”

Today, Kidman is getting a second chance to experience some big firsts. Her first wedding anniversary just passed, and her desire to have a child with Urban is palpable. “I’m yearning to have one. I think I would be very sad if I wasn’t able to have a baby,” she says. “Keith knows I want one, and he has been getting there slowly.” In the meantime, she is clearing her schedule. “Since getting married, I’ve passed on things,” she says. “I do not want to be living my life away from the person I love. I just won’t do it.”

As we sit eating lunch, taking in the view from her dining room, and listening to an eclectic mix CD that her husband made for her, she tells me that they plan to buy more property in Tennessee, so they can have horses and lots of space. She also intends to spend more time in L.A., where Cruise lives, because they have joint custody of the children. The ex-couple seem to have put their differences behind them; in fact, Cruise sent her flowers for her 40th birthday.

Kidman has not owned a house in L.A. since her divorce. Last year she rented her friend Naomi Watts’s house in Brentwood while Watts was in New York with fiancé Liev Schreiber. “The two of us should probably swap places, because she will probably be spending far more time in New York,” Kidman says. “My kids want to live in L.A., and they’ve hit a certain age where they dig in their heels. Keith is very obliging with that.”

Despite all the change, complications, and challenges, Kidman seems settled and at peace. “I still have a certain amount of awe in terms of the unpredictability of our lives,” she says. “I had big expectations and big dreams. Now I have more of a … ” She throws up her hands and laughs, finding herself at a rare loss for words. After a pause, she continues. “I kept looking for happiness, and then I realized: This is it. It’s a moment, and it comes, and it goes, and it’ll come back again. I yearn for things, but at the same time I’m just peaceful.”