TLDR
Nicole Kidman says she learned her mother had died alone in a Venice hotel room just minutes before accepting a Best Actress prize, a night that now defines how she thinks about resilience, family, and what she wants her legacy to be.
Nicole Kidman remembers the satin gown, the flashbulbs, the thrill of a Venice Film Festival standing ovation. She also remembers the message that arrived just before she walked onstage, the one that turned a career high into the loneliest night of her life.
Speaking at the “HISTORYTalks 2026” live series, the 58-year-old Academy Award winner pulled back the curtain on that night in September 2024, when she won Best Actress for “Babygirl” in Venice. The moment was supposed to be a pure celebration.
“I had won best actress at the Venice Film Festival. This seems to be such a common theme through my life,” she said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I was about to go on stage, and I found out my mother had died.”
Kidman did not walk straight into the spotlight. Instead, she left the bustle of the festival and returned to her room on the lagoon. “I went right back to the room in Venice, got into bed, and was completely devastated,” she shared. The award waited outside. Grief did not.
Her mother, Janelle, had been her anchor, advocate, and quiet strategist, and Kidman admits she struggled to imagine a life without her. She recalled that her mother “was so much a part of my existence. The idea of being there at that particular moment was harrowing.”
The actress says surviving that night alone in Italy has become a private measure of her inner steel. She tells people that “when I know I am resilient” and that she “can survive pretty much anything.” Janelle died that month at 84. The loss did not just break Kidman’s heart. It redirected her.
Two years later, in a conversation with investigative journalist Vicky Nguyen for a “Silk Speaker Series” event, Kidman revealed she plans to train as a death doula. The decision traces directly back to her mother’s final days. “As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” Kidman explained, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
She described trying to juggle that vigil with real life. “Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father was not in the world anymore, and that is when I went, I wish there were these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.”
That longing grew from a bond decades in the making. Kidman has often credited Janelle with quietly engineering her daughters’ futures. She once told the Sydney Morning Herald that her mother “carved her own path and wanted her daughters to have the same opportunity to carve their own paths.” Kidman added, “Mom did not necessarily get the career that she wanted, but she was determined that her daughters would have opportunities that were equal.”
“That has given me my life. And she gave me my life, she and my dad,” Kidman said. It is a sentiment that now echoes in the way she raises her own children.
Kidman shares daughters Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 15, with her husband, Keith Urban. She has been spotted cheering from the sidelines of Sunday’s budding modeling career, including her runway debut at Paris Fashion Week for Miu Miu and appearances at Chanel shows in the French capital. The support mirrors what she received from Janelle, only now it plays out under the scrutiny of modern fashion cameras.
From Venice to Paris, from film sets to private hospital rooms, Kidman’s story in this chapter is less about trophies and more about presence. She is still collecting awards, still fronting studio slates like “The Big Picture” at CinemaCon, but the night her phone lit up in Venice appears to have reset her compass. The glamour has not faded, yet behind it stands a daughter who has already lived through the call every child dreads, and who now believes she can survive “pretty much anything.”
Have you ever had a major life milestone collide with a personal loss, the way Nicole Kidman did in Venice? Did it change what you value most?
