THE AFTER HOURS ACTRESS

A while back, she suggested she simply was going through a phase where she lacked the 8220;primal urge8221; to act. More recently, she mentioned 8220;mistakes8221; she8217;d made in picking roles. Or maybe she was just happy, she said, floating the notion that 8220;my whole life was so full that my interest in performing had really lessened.8221;

Whatever we believe, she rediscovered her love of acting in writer-director Noah Baumbach8217;s dark comedy about wedding plans that go awry with the arrival of Kidman as the bride8217;s older sister, a writer who can8217;t help speaking her mind.

Kidman made it clear that she8217;s not one of those starlets who slum in an art film or two in a bid to prove their bona fides. The poseurs are quickly exposed, after all, by the most basic of acting chores, such as having to adopt an accent.

Consider how Kidman takes on one voice in Margot8212;of a New York literati8212;then another in the epic she8217;s filming in her home country, Baz Luhrmann8217;s WW II-era Australia, in which she plays an upper-crust Englishwoman who inherits a cattle ranch. After that? She becomes a German palm reader in Stephen Daldry8217;s The Reader.

Of course, there8217;s a risk too in climbing a gnarly tree, as Kidman does in Margot, pulling herself up branch by branch, to heights that high-priced stars are not supposed to go. 8220;Margot came at a time, I think, when I was just ready to be awakened as an actress.8221;

When producer Scott Rudin sent her Baumbach8217;s script, she didn8217;t think she was right to portray the spoilsport older sister, a Manhattan author. Then she saw his The Squid and the Whale, also about a dysfunctional family, 8220;and I said, 8216;All right, I8217;ll just kind of jump in.8217;8221;

Kidman does not like to go too far into this aspect of the craft. When she goes to the movies, she says, she doesn8217;t want to know what the actors were thinking at any moment or what they drew on in their own lives. She8217;d rather maintain 8220;the mystery of performances.8221;

The spotlight on Kidman8217;s family life has inevitably focused on first husband Cruise and second husband Keith Urban, and after that her younger sister, Antonia, a TV personality in Australia, with whom she speaks daily. 8220;We always say if we outlive our husbands we8217;d live together,8221; Kidman said.

When you spend so much time on movie sets, you build families there too, and 76-year-old costume designer Ann Roth is part of Kidman8217;s after working with her on The Hours, Cold Mountain and Margot. So is dialogue coach Elizabeth Himelstein.

One way Kidman found to become allied with her character in Margot was to see her as making trouble for her sister out of love. 8220;I8217;ve got to save her from this man. This isn8217;t good enough for her,8221; she said. 8220;How many of us have had people in our lives say that?8221;

Kidman knows of such things better than most, given the blood sport of speculation about her first marriage, and to a lesser degree her second, to Urban, the Australian-raised country singer, who, four months after they wed, checked into the Betty Ford Center for rehab. When he got out, he thanked his wife for staying 8220;strong and loving8221;8212;for, in the country tradition, standing by her man.

It8217;s in that context that she tells us that she8217;s finally found the balance between love and work.

-Paul Lieberman LAT-WP