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Australian actress Nicole Kidman made her film debut in the drama remake Bush Christmas in 1983. Four years later, she starred in the television miniseries Vietnam, for which she received the Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini Series award from the Australian Film Institute. Kidman's breakthrough role was in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm; her performance as a married woman trapped on a yacht with a psychopathic murderer earned critical acclaim and international recognition. She followed this with her Hollywood debut opposite Tom Cruise in Tony Scott's auto-racing film Days of Thunder (1990). Her role as a homocidal weather forecaster in Gus Van Sant's crime comedy-drama To Die For garnered Kidman a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical in 1996. She reteamed with Cruise on Stanley Kubrick's erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.
Kidman played a courtesan in Baz Luhrmann's 2001 musical Moulin Rouge!, for which she received her second Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical, and her first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. In the same year, Kidman appeared in the horror-thriller The Others which garnered her a nomination for Best Actress at the BAFTAs. For her role as writer Virginia Woolf in the drama The Hours (2002) she became the first Australian to win the Academy Award for Best Actress.
In 2003, Kidman starred in Lars von Trier's Dogville, the drama The Human Stain, and the epic war drama Cold Mountain. The following year, she appeared in the sci-fi comedy film The Stepford Wives (2004), and the drama Birth (2004). Four years later, Kidman reunited with Luhrmann on the historical drama Australia. In 2010, she starred in the drama Rabbit Hole for which she received a nomination at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and Screen Actors Guild Awards. Kidman played novelist Martha Gellhorn in the television biopic Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012), for which she received a Primetime Emmy nomination. In 2014, she played actress and princess Grace Kelly in the biopic Grace of Monaco, and starred as an evil taxidermist in the comedy Paddington. The following year, Kidman portrayed writer and archaeologist Gertrude Bell in the biopic Queen of the Desert (2015).