Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an actress. In Australia where she comes from her

performance in a television series Vietnam made her a star overnight. Further

successes including the film Dead Calm, took her to

Hollywood to play the love interest in a Tom Cruise film. She went one

better than mere acting and married him. Since then, films such as To Die

for and Portrait of a Lady have seen her develop as a performer of great

skill and versatility. A reputation she enhanced recently by taking a 40 pound a night job on the

London stage in David Hare's the blue room an adaptation of the

famous sexual merry-go-round l'erand. The critics raved. Men in the audience went pink

with pleasure and everyone agreed that this beautiful woman was a very fine

actress indeed. She says of herself, I'm attracted to danger. It's something I have to fight in

myself. She is Nicole Kidman. It's been a huge success

Nicole. They say tickets were going on the internet for a thousand pounds a pair.

You can't have thought that would happen when you agreed to do this show in a little theatre in the back of London.

I had no idea. No. So it's been, I mean for me it's actually been the best experience I've had.

And you hadn't been on the stage for a long time

had you? 11 years. Really? Just on cinema. So that was frightening in itself.

And then there was the fact that of course there were a lot of people the critics and the chatterers whispering can she

act?

Well luckily I sort of stopped reading the papers and everything when I started rehearsing

...