Nicole on Isabel, Henry, and Jane

NEW YORK -- In a strained inversion of the life-imitating-art conceit, Nicole Kidman -- whose marriage to Tom Cruise might have been perceived as opportunistic -- portrays the victim of a fictional opportunistic marriage, Isabel Archer in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady. With this performance, following her brilliant turn in last year's To Die For, she vindicates herself as one of film's greatest actresses and not an upstart with a career on Cruise control.

Certainly Cruise's clout had nothing to do with her casting in Portrait. Campion first noted Kidman, then 17, when she auditioned her in her student film A Girl's Own Story. (Kidman had to decline because of school exams.) "I think she had the intensity and the strength she has now," Campion recalls. "And she had an incredible enthusiasm; she just radiated.

"I remember advising her to be careful. It's so easy to be misguided, to get into people's hands that don't look after you. I frankly think that did happen to her when she came to Hollywood. Agents gave her bad advice, she was in a load of crappy movies. But she's discovered the power of her talent and she's fierce. Despite her mainstream looks and her husband, she's got an independent sensibility."

Despite her high opinion of her work, Campion gave Kidman a hard time before granting her the prized role of Archer. "She cast me and then said I don't think you can do it," says Kidman. "I said, you've got to give me a chance to audition. You can't just take it away from me. So she gave me scenes to audition and said, `I'll take a week to decide.' After a week she called and said she didn't want to do it. But I took it to another level. I was intimidated by her at first; she's one of the greatest directors in the world. But after that I was able to overcome my fear and tell her what I wanted."

What she wanted, of course, was to embody Henry James's most enigmatic and charismatic character from a novel that had beguiled her since she was a teenager. "I did an essay on it in school, then I read it again at 22. My grade? I don't remember. Not so good. I found a lot of the motivations confusing. When I read it again when I was 22, I'd gone through a stage of my life where I'd read a lot of dark literature: Dostoyevsky and the Russians."

Kidman's approach to the material, like Campion's, was more intuitive than analytical. "I wanted to take it away from intellectually judging Isabel, to viscerally become her. We wanted not to control the way the character was going to end up but to discover it through my experience and Jane's experience."

Despite this instinctive approach, Kidman's defense of some of Campion's more controversial choices is more articulate than the director's own. Jamesian purists flinch at one of the film's most wrongheaded sequences -- a gimmicky fantasy montage -- that follows one of its finest: when Osmond seduces Isabel with a parasol, a kiss, and the words, "I am absolutely in love with you."

"Cinema needs to use images; in the novel you have the whole interior monologue. The fantasies show us Isabel's sexuality, which is repressed and complicated and relevant to the film. Part of it is being attracted to the wrong man, knowing it's the wrong person, and convincing yourself it's the right person. That's why the `I'm absolutely in love with you' and the black and white montage in the middle is necessary to show her interior struggle."

Did Cruise, with whom she's currently making Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, say, "I'm absolutely in love with you"?

"Not in those particular words," she says with another nervous laugh. I made a decision. I met Tom and I knew that he was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with."

-- PK