The American Film Institute (AFI) Board of Trustees will bestow his 49th AFI Life Achievement Award on Oscar winner Nicole Kidman at their June 10, 2023 ceremony at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. Kidman is the first Australian actor to receive this honor.
“Nicole Kidman has enchanted audiences for decades with the daring of her artistry and the glamour of a screen icon,” said Kathleen Kennedy, Chair of the AFI Board of Trustees. “She is a force both brave in her choices and bold in each performance. AFI is honored to present her with the 49th AFI Life Achievement Award.”
Kidman’s cinematic canon has spanned work with such filmmakers as Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola, Baz Luhrmann, Aaron Sorkin, Anthony Minghella, Sydney Pollack, Lars von Trier and Stanley Kubrick.
She was nominated five times at the Oscars –4x for Leading Actress for Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, Rabbit Hole and this year’s Being the Ricardos for her portrayal as Lucille Ball and once in Supporting Actress for Lion. She won Best Actress in 2003 for Stephen Daldry’s The Hours playing the role of Virginia Woolf.
Her breakthrough role came in Phillip Noyce’s 1989 thriller Dead Calm. Throughout her career, Kidman has won a BAFTA Award, two Emmys–for Lead Actress Limited Series and Outstanding Limited Series for HBO’s Big Little Lies, and six Golden Globes. She co-founded her production company Blossom Films in 2010.
She starred this year in Robert Eggers’ viking epic The Northman from Focus Features. Her top grossing features include Aquaman (the highest grossing DC movie ever at $1.1 billion WW; the sequel of which, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom comes out Christmas 2023), Happy Feet ($384M), The Golden Compass ($372M), Batman Forever ($337M), and Paddington ($272M).
In theater, Kidman made a highly-lauded London stage debut in the fall of 1998, starring with Iain Glen in The Blue Room, David Hare’s modern adaptation of Schnitzler’s La Ronde. For her performance, Kidman won London’s Evening Standard Award and was nominated in the Best Actress category for a Laurence Olivier Award. In 2015, Kidman was seen on the West End stage in Anna Ziegler’s Photograph 51, for which she received a London Evening Standard Award.
In January of 2006, Kidman was awarded Australia’s highest honor, the Companion in the Order of Australia. She was also awarded the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear award for her performance in The Hours. In 2017, the Cannes Film Festival honored Kidman with the 70th Anniversary Prize for her body of work and longstanding history with the festival. She is one of only eight people to ever receive this honor.
Kidman has served as Goodwill Ambassador for UN Women for nearly two decades. Along with her husband, Keith Urban, she has helped raise millions over the years for the Stanford Women’s Cancer Program which is a world-renowned center for research into the causes, treatment, prevention, and eventual cure of women’s cancer.
Kidman’s many upcoming projects include Lulu Wang’s Expats for Amazon, Lioness for Paramount+, and Holland, Michigan for Amazon.
