At the same time, as far as I can tell, Kidman is now filming Birth, the new film from Jonathan Glazer (whose Sexy Beast immediately promoted him to the list of A directors). There are several writers on this project, including Jean-Claude Carriere, but in outline it is the story of a woman who begins to believe that her 10-year-old son may be the reincarnation of her dead husband.Pause for a moment to consider what such ventures require. In most cases these are pictures made on such a scale that Kidman would face at least a 12-week shooting schedule. But these parts may also call for the research period that on The Hours meant getting a look that, if not quite that of Virginia Woolf, was certainly beyond our ideas of Ms Kidman. As well as time to read Woolf’s books, and to absorb her life and times. If you are going to deliver something extraordinary, stepping into a cold English river, or bracing yourself against a Romanian dawn nearly as cold, you may need to understand the predicament of your character.

And when the process is over, most actors need some time to withdraw from that intensity.But once Birth is over, Kidman is committed to doing the remake of The Stepford Wives for Frank Oz. This is due to film in the late summer and autumn and has probably dashed her chances of being in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, where she was set to play Katharine Hepburn opposite Leonardo DiCaprio’s Howard Hughes.Beyond that, another two films are announced: Mr and Mrs Smith, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity), in which she will star with Brad Pitt; and Alexander the Great, a project that could start filming in 2004, directed by Kidman’s pal, Baz Lurhmann, and co-starring DiCaprio.These are the announced and contracted projects – and on most of them Kidman must have a salary in the $15m range. That is her level, and a fair reason to take on plenty of work. Of course, between now and 2005 some of these things might slip, and others emerge. But even a sketch-map of the next few years makes it clear how much of her time Kidman is reading books, scripts and contracts. For it is no exaggeration to say that sometimes the negotiation period outlasts the actual shooting. No wonder she is looking more grown up.So hope that, getting close to 40, she can still find the innocence of some wild Greek girl who caught an emperor’s eye.

Or is she playing Alexander?d.thomson independent.co.uk. Given recent releases in Britain, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Asian cinema was entirely about the present day and various shades of hipness. Most current Asian imports tend to be lurid genre variations of one sort or another – Thai horror, Korean action, the blood-curdling comic-book nuttiness of Japan’s Takashi Miike… What seems to have subsided is the wave – seemingly unstoppable a decade ago – of those lush period dramas that Kurosawa once specialised in, before the baton was taken up by Chinese mainland directors such as Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige.