When did Nicole Kidman become the sad wife of TV?

In recent years, the award-winning actor has forged a new career playing wealthy women who are weighed down by cashmere scarves and troubled pasts, says Katie Rosseinsky

- Katie Rosseinsky

Does the female protagonist of your current favourite TV show seem ill at ease in her multi-million dollar home? Is there a high probability that she's harbouring a dark secret? Does she like to stare out across the sunset/cityscape/rolling ocean waves (delete as appropriate) while pondering said secret? Is she married to a handsome man whose veneer of charm is growing more fragile with every episode? Finally – and this one’s very important – does her hair look great even as she’s subject to intense psychological distress? If you’ve answered yes to all of the above, congratulations: your show passes the Nicole Kidman test. In fact, there’s a 99 per cent chance that Kidman is already starring in it.

Over the best part of the last decade, Kidman has repeatedly gravitated towards scripts that require her to embody beautiful women in high tax brackets who are weighed down by cashmere scarves and troubled pasts. She has become prestige television’s preeminent sad wife, well versed in portraying women who are just about holding it all together (and looking ethereally beautiful while doing so). Have you recently read a psychological thriller in which a well-to-do lady is pushed to the limit by a suspicious death or a tragic disappearance? You can bet that Kidman and her production company Blossom Films have already snapped up the option rights (if not, her friend Reese Witherspoon might have got there first).

Take, for example, Kidman’s latest splashy Netflix project, The Perfect Couple, based on the hit novel by American writer Elin Hilderbrand. In it, she plays Greer Garrison Winbury, the matriarch of a WASPy all-American family and an author so staggeringly successful that she has graced the cover of TIME magazine. She doesn’t so much walk as waft through the air like a particularly refined (and expensive) perfume; she dresses exclusively in tasteful muted tones.