Nicole Kidman lied about height to secure auditions early in career

Nicole Kidman has revealed she had to lie about her height early in her career, taking half an inch off to secure auditions.

Kidman is 5ft 11in (1.8 metres) but she told the Radio Times she would pretend to be 5ft 10 and a half to get work.

“I was told, ‘You won’t have a career. You’re too tall’,” she said. “People would say, ‘How’s the air up there?’ Now, I get, ‘You’re so much taller than I thought’, or men grappling with how high my heels should be. Whenever I go on the red carpet, I get sent shoes that are always so high. I’m like, ‘Do they have a kitten heel? I’m going to be the tallest person – a giraffe!’”

Recalling a failed audition for the musical Annie when she was a child, Kidman said those in contention were being measured before being allowed into the audition room. She was 5ft 4in at the time, two inches above the 5ft 2in cut-off.

Despite this, she managed to talk her way into the audition room and pleaded for a part. “I didn’t get the part,” she said. “I didn’t even get a call back – but at least I got to sing four lines of a chorus.”

Kidman said she told her teenage daughters, Sunday and Faith, that any physical insecurities they may have were not important. “What matters is how you allow other people to either say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to you, and whether you accept that,” she said. “Inner resilience as a human being, that’s the superpower really.”

The Thor actor Chris Hemsworth told the Radio Times in 2016 that he lied about his height in the past to secure roles. “There are certainly things I’ve wanted to go up for which I’ve been totally wrong for, physically,” he said. “And I normally lie about my height [6ft 3in] and say I’m shorter. But it can go two ways. The brief for the audition for Thor said: ‘must be over 6ft 1in’, which I’d never seen before.”

Kidman is best known for her roles in Eyes Wide Shut, Moulin Rouge and Cold Mountain. She has been nominated for five Oscars, winning one for best actress in 2003 for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours. She is starring in the Amazon Prime show Expats, which will debut at the end of this month.

Kidman was not the only person to tell the Radio Times of her height-related woes. University Challenge producers have decided to give the new host, Amol Rajan, a smaller chair for the next series of the BBC show.

“There was a lot of commentary about the size of the chair. Everyone said I looked like the bad guy in Inspector Gadget, that I was going to turn around and I’d be stroking a cat,” he told the magazine. “The next series will have me sitting in a marginally smaller chair.”