Cirrus@Austlit

'Critical reception and repeated erasures Celebrity discourses and the construction of the star performer have been significantly fashioned by actresses, as theatre and film scholars have argued.1 Australian-American, Nicole Kidman, born in 1967, one of the highest paid actresses in the world and named as one of the top 100 most influential women in the world in 2018 and 2019, has generated her own celebrity industry with some striking particularities and risks in her career choices.2 She has knowingly drawn on the iconicity of celebrity performers from the Hollywood golden age, yet cleverly turned the chameleonic and unexpected into important aspects of her professional brand. In a recent essay, I have argued that intellectual acuity, shrewd business sense, strategic decision-making and agency have been effaced in theatre history and that memoir and biographical accounts of actresses all too often follow a familiar pattern that prefers the marginalisation of artistic craft, managerial excellence and commercial flair - as though the sagacious cultivation of a professional career might somehow do injury to an actress's professional persona.3 Kidman has suffered from these negative frames to an extreme degree. Male star studies theorists, such as Richard Dyer and David Thomson, have foregrounded discourses of desire that focus on spectator fantasy at the expense of an actress's acting prowess and agency.4 Kidman's glamorous sexual allure has famously dazzled influential cultural commentators (usually white and male) to such an extent that a prevalent construct of her acting technique is that it depends on a projection of herself as a beautiful but empty vessel in order to best accommodate viewer fantasy. To cite a few telling examples: 'Nicole may be an enquiring mind ... but she is a cover girl too'; 'intelligence muffles instinct and spontaneity because it shadows true acting'; 'She doesn't let herself be seen pondering or calculating. Because then if you make a mistake, you can begin to look foolish'; 'She knows how far she relies on stupid luck.' (Introduction)