It's A Kind Of Magic

Nicole Kidman may be older and wiser, with a better understanding of why things happen when they are meant to happen (her words), but what hasn’t changed is the sense of magic and adulation this powerhouse performer shares with her global fanbase.

- Cindy Pearlman

Nicole Kidman knows as well as anyone that families come in all shapes and sizes.

The Oscar winning international superstar plays an adoptive mother in her new movie, “Lion,” but she’s no stranger to motherhood. She and her husband, country singer Keith Urban, are the parents of 5-year-old Faith Margaret Urban and 8-year-old Sunday Rose Urban, who live with them in Nashville, Los Angeles and Australia. She’s also the adopted mother of two adult children, 23-year-old Isabella Cruise and 21-year-old Connor Cruise, with her ex-husband Tom Cruise.

“However that family comes together, the only thing that matters is that it does come together,” Kidman said. “For a child to be loved and to grow up in a family with love is the most important thing in the world.”

Lion, directed by Garth Davis, is the true story of Saroo Brierley (played by Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel), a 5-year-old Indian boy who stepped onto the wrong train and was carried almost a thousand miles away from the home he shared with his mother and brother. By the time authorities realised that he was lost, he was no longer able to tell them who his parents were or where they lived.

Eventually he was adopted into a loving home in Australia. As an adult, however, Saroo decided to search for his birth family using Google Earth, with the unqualified support of his adoptive parents (Kidman and David Wenham).

The film is based on Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home (2014). A film festival circuit hit in Toronto and London, the movie was purchased by the Weinstein Company and has garnered award-season attention for both Kidman and Patel.

Offered the role of adoptive mother Sue Brierley, Kidman said, she didn’t have to think twice.