Nicole Kidman has revealed her beloved mother has died, just hours before she was awarded Best Actress for her role in Babygirl at the Venice Film Festival, which came to a close on Saturday.
The actress, 57, who stars as a high-powered New York business executive who starts a risky affair with her much-younger intern, played by Harris Dickinson, was not in attendance.
Instead, her director Halina Reijn read a statement from the actor, revealing that Nicole's mother Janelle died at the age of 83 while she was in Venice.
The statement read: 'Today I arrived in Venice to find out shortly after, that my beautiful, brave mother Janelle Ann Kidman has just passed.
'I am in shock and I have to go to my family, but this award is for her, she shaped me, she guided me, and she made me.
'I am beyond grateful that I get to say her name to all of you through Halina, the collision of life and art is heart-breaking, and my heart is broken.
'We love you all.'
In an interview with the Fresh Air podcast in January 2022, Nicole spoke briefly about her mother's health issues.
She said they'd managed to visit the Art Gallery of New South Wales after-hours, where they took in the Matisse: Life & Spirit exhibition, describing it as 'soothing balm'.
'We're down here primarily to take care of my mother and to have her surrounded by her grandchildren,' she said.
'So luckily yesterday, even though Omicron is raging through this country, we were able to take her into the gallery after hours and show her the Matisse exhibit, which coming from a mother who's raised me in the arts, it was soothing balm. Matisse was soothing balm last night.'
Later in the interview, Nicole said she felt privileged to be able to see the world through her mother's eyes, describing it as 'so beneficial'.
'I'm at the place where I'm being given the chance to view the world, because of how close we are, my mum is giving me the chance to view the world through an 81-year-old woman's eyes,' she explained.
'That is so beneficial right now, because she's so cognisant. She has every brain faculty available, so she hasn't lost anything. She hasn't lost any memory, which is fascinating, and she's extremely bright.
'She's giving me access, because she's also very direct and very honest, and so I'm getting access to the world through her eyes, my mother's eyes, so therefore a part of me almost at 80.'
She added: 'It's her perspective, obviously. There's many different 80-year-old perspectives, but it's her perspective, and her particular path, but I'm drinking it in and learning.'
During Venice Film Festival, Nicole admitted she felt 'vulnerable' filming multiple scenes of masturbation, plus a depiction of a submissive/dominant relationship for the erotic new thriller.
Rising British star Harris Dickinson has a career-making turn as Samuel, the intern who intuits that his boss Kidman, the CEO of a tech firm, wants to be dominated.
Nicole has made nothing like it since the dream-like erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut with then-husband Tom Cruise 25 years ago.
She said that an intimacy co-ordinator and closed set had been vital to conjuring the sex scenes which tell the story of her character's existential crisis, resolved through a taboo-busting sexual odyssey.
The actress said: 'I think this film is obviously yes about sex, but it's about desire it's about your inner thoughts, it's about secrets, it's about marriage, it's about truth, power, consent.
'This is one woman's story and this is I hope a very liberating story. It's told by a woman through her gaze. It's Halina (Reijn's) script, she wrote it and she directs and that made it unique, that suddenly I was going to be in the hands of a woman with this material. It was very dear to our shared instincts and very, very freeing.'
She added: 'I don't think there's a judgement attached (about the character). It's for each person to react to Romy and the way she behaves.
'My connection to it is that I want to examine human beings, women, on screen, to explore what it means to be human in all the facets of that and the labyrinth of that.'
She said that she was: 'exposed and vulnerable and frightened when it comes to giving it to the world' but that her experience of making it had been: 'delicate and intimate and very deep.'
She said: 'I knew she wasn't going to exploit me. However anyone interprets that, I didn't feel exploited. I felt very much a part of that. There was enormous caretaking by all of us, we were all very gentle with each other and helped each other. It felt very authentic, protected and, at the same time, real.'
The film opens with Kidman's character, Romy Mathis, faking a very convincing orgasm while having sex with her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, and then going into another room and masturbating to pornography.
She explores her desire to be dominated with her intern but – unlike in previous erotic dramas such as Basic Instinct – female desire doesn't destroy her career or her family life and, without giving away the ending, she remains professionally powerful and married at its conclusion.
Director Reijn said: 'I think all beings have different sides within ourselves and we all have a beast within ourselves. For women, we don't have a lot of space yet to explore this behaviour.
'I don't believe in good or evil I believe that we are both.' She added that men needed to work on the 'huge orgasm gap.' Actor Dickinson chimed in: 'Everyone deserves a good orgasm.'
He added: 'I think there is a confusion about how to conduct yourself and how to conduct yourself within sex. Halina was always ready to dissect and challenge that and to challenge the nuance of that behaviour that opened up a whole new world for me.'
The steamy movie will also include some very intimate scenes including one of Nicole's character masturbating after having sex with her husband, played by Antonio Banderas .
Addressing the erotic scenes, Nicole - who most recently starred in another age-gap romance, A Family Affair - admitted it is the most 'exposed' she has ever felt in front of the camera.
Speaking to Vanity Fair, Nicole said she isn't sure she is 'brave enough' to watch the film on the big screen at its Venice Film Festival premiere next month.
'There's something in me going: 'Okay, this was made for the big screen and to be seen with people. I'm not sure I have that much bravery,' Nicole told the publication.
'I've made some films that are pretty exposing, but not like this,' she added of the 'confronting' experience.
Nicole shared her apprehension over audiences seeing the sex scenes, admitting that the 'vulnerable' filming process left her feeling 'ragged'.
Babygirl review: Nicole Kidman sizzles in this tale of passion and power across the age divide, writes BRIAN VINER
Babygirl
Verdict: A sexy, post #MeToo thriller
One of the oddities of these post #MeToo years in Hollywood is that Lolita-style stories about older men falling for much younger women or even schoolgirls have practically disappeared – while the opposite dynamic is suddenly all the rage.
Hardly a month seems to pass without an older woman bedding a chap 25 years her junior, as if to right a century of cinematic wrongs.
Anyway, hot on the high heels of Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine getting it together in The Idea of You on Amazon Prime, and Nicole Kidman cavorting with Zac Efron in A Family Affair on Netflix, along comes Kidman again, entangled in more ways than one with 28-year-old British actor Harris Dickinson in the steamy psychosexual thriller Babygirl.
Here at the Venice Film Festival, air-conditioned cinemas are currently offering a blessed relief from hotter-than-usual weather. But last night's world premiere of Babygirl brought a different kind of sizzle.
Kidman has described it as the most 'exposing' performance she has ever given – which, considering 1999's Eyes Wide Shut, is quite a claim.
She plays Romy, a corporate hotshot who runs a thriving robotics company replacing warehouse staff with automatons, and making wise observations to her workforce such as 'one-day shipping has dramatically upped the ante'.
On the face of it she is as serenely successful at home as she is at work. Her dishy theatre director husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas) seems only too delighted to cater to her somewhat vigorous sexual demands, and she to his. The family unit is completed by a couple of teenage daughters – not that Dutch writer-director Halina Reijn spends much time developing them. One of them is gay and the other likes dancing.
Still, Reijn has other matters to attend to, and gets down to them with arresting urgency. Filmmakers sometimes start their features with sound rather than pictures – a hubbub of people chatting, perhaps, or a lone dog barking in the street. Here, it's Romy evidently in the throes of sexual ecstasy, although she needs to look at online porn to finish the job. 'Exposing' indeed.
Later, on her way to work, Romy is struck by the sight of a young man calming a dangerous dog. The young man turns out to be Samuel (Dickinson), one of a new batch of company interns, who are duly ushered in to pay homage to Romy in her swanky office. She instantly clocks his good looks and his swagger, and soon enough she finds that she cannot resist him.
But Babygirl is not just the story of an illicit office affair across the age divide. Far more interestingly, it is about power and workplace politics. Samuel senses that Romy, whose job is telling others what to do, has a kinky yearning to be the one jumping to orders. So the CEO and the intern switch roles; the boss becomes the bossed.
That is far from the end of the affair. There are revelations and recriminations, ambitions thwarted, and hints that Romy's sexual psychoses are somehow connected with a strange childhood spent in cults and communes.
There is also an ending that couldn't possibly happen if this were a relationship between a male head honcho and a woman much lower on the corporate ladder. However, at the same time, I wonder if Heijn is being quite as counterintuitive as she thinks: this is still, for the most part, a story in which the man holds the cards.
Nevertheless, it is a smart, sexy film, brilliantly and boldly acted by Kidman and Dickinson, with first-class support from Banderas (who has spent most of his career being absolutely nobody's idea of a cuckold).
As for the almost-unmentionable, the alleged cosmetic work that sometimes seems to have limited Kidman's range of expressions from A only to about D, that is cleverly woven into the narrative. Romy is clearly the kind of woman who would make a friend of Botox.
On the subject of injections, for the rest of us here in Venice, after some so-so early films, Babygirl has given us just the shot of adrenaline we required.
Babygirl comes out in January
