On Nicole

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who dislike Nicole Kidman, and those who loathe her. Something about this woman – with her frozen forehead and her white-rooted hair and her penchant for freaky men – just pisses people off, and they’ve all have been having a merry time as the festive season of Kidman-bashing gets underway. If you haven't been following, here's the latest:

• She sucks on Letterman.
• She sucks on Facebook.
• She sucks as a mother.
• She sucks at opening a movie.
• She sucks in Australia.
• She sucks in The Reader, which she wasn’t in, but if she had been, she would have sucked.

So what is it about Kidman that provokes this kind of ball-tearing? Maybe it’s just that she always seems to be trying too hard. She’s trying too hard to be breezy on Letterman; she’s trying too hard to emote on Oprah; she’s trying too hard to paint herself as a serious art actress, blockbuster queen, comic foil, indie darling, fashion muse and global humanitarian; and on screen, where she’s painfully self-conscious, she’s trying too hard to act.

Maybe it’s also that sense she gives off that as a frizz-haired, freckled adolescent living at the bottom of the world she set her sights on global stardom and then mustered every last drop of ambition to achieve it. If that meant a lightning-speed marriage to a top-billed nut, a radical regime of peeling and dyeing and straightening and slimming, a much-hyped breakdown and press tour and subsequent sympathy Oscar, and a string of all-too-carefully chosen movie vehicles and well-timed charity appearances, then so be it. Maybe it's a Faustian pact that she wrestles with every time that turbo-charged needle inches towards her embattled brow.