Nicole Kidman: A Kind of Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

express an array of emotions, using only her face; beautifully done, it was accomplished in one take and established Nicole as an actress to be reckoned with. When the miniseries aired, Australians reacted very emotionally to the scene and quickly elevated Nicole to star status. The Australian Film Institute responded by presenting her with an award—her first—for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Television Drama.”
    ~ ~ ~
     After the success of Vietnam , Nicole showed up for work in Perth for her next project overflowing with enthusiasm and optimism. Windrider , directed by veteran Australian cinematographer Vincent Monton, was a windsurfing movie directed toward the youth market. Nicole signed on to play the roll of Jade, a rock singer who falls for a wind surfer (Tom Burlinson) who works at his father’s engineering firm.
    Burlinson, who was thirty when filming began, was born in Toronto, Canada to British-born parents, who subsequently moved to New Jersey, then back to England, then on to Australia, where the parents divorced and Burlinson remained with his father. After doing television in his early twenties, he got his big break in 1981 when he was cast as Jim Craig in The Man From Snowy River, starring Kirk Douglas. He had made two additional movies by the time he signed on for Windrider , but, for some reason, his career had cooled considerably by then.
    Windrider begins with Nicole watching Burlinson do a 360-degree turn on a windsurfing board. There is almost no plot development in this movie and Nicole has very few good lines. Mostly, she stands around looking pretty, saying things like “What are you doing, mate?” She still has a deep Australian accent at this point in her career and she plays that up, sometimes looking like a caricature of an Aussie punk rocker on the make. She does no singing in the film, but she does lip-sync to the music.
    The most notable thing about this movie is that eighteen-year-old Nicole does her first nude scene, ever. It occurs with Burlison in a shower, where she is covered with soap lather. Subsequently, she does other nude scenes in which she displays her still-developing breasts (an A-cup would seem excessive coverage) and barely legal buttocks, clearly her best physical asset at that point in her life.
    Probably not until the movie was released did Nicole know she had made a mistake. Reviews were typical of the one written by Desmond Ryan for the Philadelphia Inquirer : “ Windrider , an Australian production that proves that Hollywood has no monopoly on airhead entertainment, doesn’t have much more content than the average balloon .  .  . [it] would have done everyone a favor by forgetting its silly plot and following the wave created by The Endless Summer. In this case, facts would make a stronger movie than fiction.”
    Nicole’s judgment in making the film may have been impaired after shooting began because she began dating her co-star, Tom Burlinson. It was the first big romance of her life and lasted for nearly three years. She was enthusiastic about the romance and transferred that enthusiasm to a film that was not worthy of her passion.
    Windrider ended up becoming a turning point in Burlinson’s career. He made only four feature films after that, and although he worked in several Australian television series, he put less emphasis on acting as the years went by (he has not made a movie in over ten years) to focus on his singing career. He has a singing voice that is remarkably similar to that of Frank Sinatra—he was chosen to be the voice of the “young” Sinatra in the American miniseries produced by Tina Sinatra—and he has made a nice living in Australia in the early 2000s with a stage show he created, “The Sinatra Story in Song.”
    ~ ~ ~
    In an 1989 interview with Rolling Stone , Nicole was philosophical about both Burlinson and the movie: “I accepted roles when I was younger, which I don’t regret, because on