USA Today

Los Angeles

For Nicole Kidman, love last year came in the form of a new man, or so it appears from reports of her involvement with rocker Lenny Kravitz. After her divorce from Tom Cruise in 2001, she threw herself into her work and won an Oscar in 2003 for ‘The Hours’. Lately she has been spotted wearing a diamond ring on her left hand.

Not today. She looks super-thin in jeans and a black sweater set, her face fresh and her hair pulled back. She moves a pillow from a small couch in a room at the Hotel Bel-Air, sits down and begins to explore the topic of love.

Ask her how she’s feeling about love and she says: “I feel protective of myself.”

But the question everyone wants to know: Is she engaged? Kidman, 36, has her answer down pat — neither a confirmation nor a denial: “Unless I’m married, I don’t talk about it. It’s that simple. I can’t. It’s not being coy; it’s being protective — of my own emotions and protective of any person in my life. And my children.”

Her philosophy of love is that “if you’re going to be with someone, you’re with them, you’re committed to them. I’m not sort of flitting around.” And, she adds, “If it ends, it ends.”

It may have already ended with Kravitz. He was seen recently in Miami with someone else, according to gossip reports.

And it certainly ended with Cruise, although she will be forever linked to him because of their two adopted children. They have spoken fondly about each other in the press and seem to have split amicably.

“It is what it is,” she says. “You’re always dealing with it. You’ve just got to have a sense of respect for the person you have children with. Anger doesn’t help anybody. Ultimately you have to say forgiveness is important, and honouring what you had together is important. But it’s easy to say and harder to do.”

She also feels strongly about honouring the truth of her relationship with Law. When tabloids wrote that they were having an affair, she sued.

“That goes against what I believe morally. That’s adultery, and if I’m accused of that, no, that’s not right. I have two kids who see that and remember that and judge me. It didn’t happen, and it’s not to be reported that way.”

They did, however, have to be intimate on the set, in character. “I think it’s one of those films you dream you would get to make. It’s an intimate love story set against an epic, epic backdrop.”

Kidman can be dreamy. She says she’s a romantic — “hopelessly so” — and cites her parents’ 40 years together as the example. Every morning her dad brings her mum breakfast in bed, she says. “Good man, eh?”

And Kidman loves watching epic love stories like ‘Gone With the Wind’. “I watch it every year. I adore Vivien Leigh. ‘Ashley!’ I’m still devastated that she can’t love Rhett. You feel like shaking her. I love the film because of that — it brings out all those emotions.”

Bringing out emotion in ‘Cold Mountain’ was trickier, says Kidman. No one wanted it to be a sentimental movie, a danger with a love story set against war. Law and Kidman liked the simplicity of the two people who fell in love and waited for each other, based on knowing each other very little.

“I believe in that,” says Kidman, 36. “If I fall, I fall, that’s it. So that really plays into my whole idea of what I think love is.”

As for her love scene with Law, she bared all, and it was pure Kidman. “I don’t believe in having body doubles for a film. You want to say, ‘I am this character’.”

Having said that, when it’s pointed out that she’s very thin, she says: “I think I’ve always been too thin. My whole life! My mum’s always said I’m too thin. Since I’m 13. But I’m not going to get a boob job. I’m just a long-limbed, flat-chested girl. Give me J Lo’s body, please! Bring it on.”