You can’t speak of superstar Nicole Kidman without also mentioning her superstar husband of ten years, Tom Cruise. That relationship began with joint film, Days of Thunder (1990) when Kidman was 22, but her career was established long before she met the famous Hollywood actor/producer.

Beginning with ballet lessons at age three, and subsequent extensive training in dance, drama and mime (at St. Martin’s Youth Theater in Melbourne and the Australian Theater for Young People), the pretty red-haired Australian (born in Hawaii) was a natural for the stage. She joined Sydney’s Philip street Theater at age 14, and earned a Sydney Theater Critics’ Best Newcomer Award for that work. She made her television debut in the still seasonably popular Bush Christmas (1983), and went on that same year to a starring role in Australian TV’s BMX Bandits, and parts in Chase Through The Night (1983), Five-Mile Creek (1983), Prince and the Great Race (1983) and 1984's Matthew and Son. Kidman’s steady television work continued with Wills and Burke (1985), Room To Move (1985), Archer’s Adventure (1985), Windrider (1986), Watch The Shadows Dance (1987), Night Master (1987), and the films Une Australienne a Rome (1987), The Bit Part (1987), and Emerald City (1988).

The actor was awarded Australian Film Institute Best Actress Awards for Vietnam (TV - 1988) and Bangkok Hilton (TV - 1989). Those two years, consecutively, she was named the Australian Public’s Best Actress of the Year.

In 1989, the now well-respected actor made her American film debut in Dead Calm. It was on her next film, Days of Thunder (1990), that she worked with her future husband. They married that year. Proving to detractors that she was not merely a “Hollywood wife” to her established actor-husband, she delivered solid performances in Emerald City (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Far and Away (1992), Flirting (1992), My Life (1993), Malice (1993), and Batman Forever (1995). Her next film, though, is considered her breakthrough success. To Die For (1995) thoroughly established Kidman as a serious actor in her own right in hard-to-please Hollywood. The Leading Man (1996), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), The Peacemaker (1997), Practical Magic (1998), Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and The Last Movie: Stanley Kubrick and “Eyes Wide Shut” (1999) followed.

Set for release in 2000, are the Kidman movies Criminal Conversation, Berlin Diaries 1940-45, Moulin Rouge, In the Cut and Heartswap.

Kidman has proved herself capable of juggling a very public marriage, a very private home-life (the couple have two adopted children), and a busy, high-caliber career in an unforgiving business. If Kidman and Cruise are, as described, “Hollywood’s most famous super-couple,” then Kidman is a bona-fide super-woman.