Nicole Kidman says her dark days helped prepare her for 'The Hours'

LOS ANGELES — Nicole Kidman used to be afraid of Virginia Woolf, preferring the romantic worlds of the Brontë sisters or Jane Austen to Woolf's demanding prose.

When it came time to play Woolf on screen in "The Hours," however, Kidman embraced the British author heart and soul.

"If you take on a role, you take it on. You don't have somebody else step in and do the hard bits," said Kidman, 35. "The Hours," which hits Seattle theaters Jan. 10, co-stars Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore and is based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name.

Kidman agreed to wear a prosthetic nose that made her almost unrecognizable, a look that vexed her two children, who referred to her as "that Woolf woman." Rather than let a double do last-minute close-ups of Woolf's hand as she wrote, Kidman insisted on returning to London from the United States to shoot the scenes, learning to write right-handed. She refused to let a double do any takes in a cold, rushing river where the crew re-enacted Woolf's suicide.

Above all, Kidman now adores the richly internalized, frank and fanciful works of the author, who killed herself in 1941 at age 59.

Growing up in Australia, Kidman had sampled Woolf's works but found them dense and oppressive.

"Discovering her in my 30s was when I needed to discover Virginia Woolf. Because I think you need to have some experiences in life, you need to have an intellectual capacity to handle Virginia, which you don't necessarily have — well, I didn't have — as a teenager," said the actress, who prepared for the role by reading "Mrs. Dalloway" and other Woolf novels, along with diaries, letters and biographies.

"The Hours" follows a day in the lives of three women: the melancholy Woolf as she begins writing "Mrs. Dalloway" in the 1920s; a despondent 1950s housewife (Moore) reading Woolf's novel; and a contemporary incarnation of Mrs. Dalloway (Streep) planning a party for a friend with AIDS (Ed Harris).

"Mrs. Dalloway" and Woolf novels such as "The Waves" and "To the Lighthouse" are difficult and unsettling reads, applying nonlinear plotting to modernist themes of feminism, mortality and isolation.

Kidman came to Woolf and "The Hours" at a suitably dark time in her own life, after a miscarriage and amid the breakup of her marriage to Tom Cruise last year.

"I was pretty nihilistic in terms of my view of what it was all about," she said. "Where we were going. Why I was existing in the world, really. Why, was the big question. So it was sort of the perfect time to encounter Mrs. Woolf. Because you're raw, emotionally raw. Your ability to understand with compassion somebody else's struggle is just there. ... It's cathartic, because it means you're not alone."

Since the breakup, Kidman emerged with an Academy Award nomination for last year's musical hit "Moulin Rouge," and more critical and commercial success with the ghost tale "The Others."

She just finished shooting Anthony Minghella's "Cold Mountain," based on Charles Frazier's Civil War novel, in which she plays the sweetheart of a wounded Confederate soldier. Jude Law and Renée Zellweger co-star.

Also in the can are "The Human Stain," based on Philip Roth's novel, in which Kidman plays a janitor involved with a classics professor (Anthony Hopkins), and the 1930s-era drama "Dogville," directed by Lars von Trier ("Dancer in the Dark").