Nicole Kidman Is No.1

For the first time, Nicole Kidman has knocked Julia Roberts off the top spot, and taken the title of Hollywood's highest-paid actress.It has been a curious year for Kidman. In her two films released in 2006, she has played a photographer and provided the voice of a penguin. She married country singer Keith Urban, who checked into rehab a few months after the wedding. She was the subject of a biography, by well-known film writer David Thomson, that contained an obsessive degree of appreciation. But this year she takes out the title as the prime female earner, with an estimated $US17 million ($A21.6 million) per film, a sum that could probably get half a dozen Australian features off the ground.

The title is bestowed courtesy of The Hollywood Reporter, which for the past five years has published lists of actress salaries. Roberts has always been top. But in 2006, Roberts has kept a low profile, only providing voices for animal life, Hova the ant in Ant Bully, and Charlotte the spider in Charlotte's Web. Kidman's estimated salary is much the same as it was in 2005. And Roberts still holds the record — $US20 million — for the highest-paid female star. But they all lag behind the $US25 million sums reportedly paid to male actors such as Tom Cruise and Jim Carrey. These pay packets are supplemented when stars are also able to negotiate highly profitable deals, including gaining a percentage of box office earnings. Kidman's career has been a carefully tended combination of Hollywood and independent roles. Arguably, her best work has been in smaller, offbeat movies. She may have an Oscar, for her performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, but many of her recent Hollywood films have not fared particularly well at the box office.One of the most successful big-budget movies is the current hit Happy Feet, George Miller's animation — soon for release in Australia — in which she voices a penguin called Norma Jean.

Kidman's career path is not exactly cluttered with blockbuster hits. In 1995, after she had spent several years in Hollywood, Gus Van Sant's To Die For gave her a breakthrough role as a murderously ambitious weather girl. She and her then husband, Tom Cruise, starred in Stanley Kubrick's last feature, Eyes Wide Shut, a film that seemed to be as much about the celebrity aura around it as the performances in it, although Kidman was an intriguing presence. She was memorable as a woman on the run in Lars von Trier's stylised Dogville, highly effective in Alejandro Amenabar's arthouse horror movie The Others, and very good in Jonathan Glazer's Birth, in which she played a woman who became convinced that her late husband was reincarnated as a 10-year-old boy. A project with cult Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai seems to have been shelved.