NICOLE KIDMAN plans to let her film career “dwindle away” when she finds the right leading man for her private life. “This life is a burn-out life in a way,” the winner of this year’s Best Actress Oscar said. “You give so much of yourself. Eventually, you have to step away. You can’t do it for ever and ever.

“I think probably when I fall in love, that’s when I’ll stop doing as much of this, because I’ll want to settle down again. That’s exciting for me.”

As she spoke, there were quiet gasps from the room at a Cannes press conference. It was hard to believe from an actress looking the epitome of a beautiful Hollywood superstar at the height of her career. Cynics suggested that she had pulled off a marvellous publicity stunt to promote her new film.

The Australian actress’s nine-year marriage to Tom Cruise ended two years ago and she recently denied rumours of a romance with Jude Law. She alluded to her marriage with Cruise when she spoke about how liberated she felt in her career.

“I went through a period in my life where I wasn’t able to move around and explore as much, so now I’m living that out. I’m on an exploration. I won’t do this for the rest of my life. There are other things that interest me. I will slowly dwindle away.”

On being told the news, Colin Vaines, executive vice-president of Miramax Films, which is making her latest film, Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain, with Law, voiced disbelief. “She has had an incredible work schedule for the last 24 months, going from one film to another,” he said. “She’s brilliant in everything she does, but it’s been a non-stop thing. She’s probably at the point where she’s done an awful lot of work and needs to take some kind of break.”

Ms Kidman, who has two adopted children aged nine and seven, was in Cannes for the premiere of Lars von Trier’s hotly awaited Dogville — the first in a trilogy that will all star her. It was written for her by the acclaimed Danish director, whose Dancer in the Dark won the Palme d’Or in 2000. The new film is in competition at Cannes and is being hailed as a frontrunner.

Dogville, whose stars include Lauren Bacall and the British actor Paul Bettany, is set in the Rocky Mountains in the Depression era. Kidman plays a beautiful woman who arrives in an isolated township on the run from gangsters. Bettany plays the community’s self-appointed town spokesman who agrees to hide her, but she soon realises that it comes with a high price.

Von Trier said that the idea behind her treatment by the townspeople was the consequence of presenting yourself to others as a gift. “The power that this gives people over the individual corrupts them.”

The sought-after Kidman, whose 1998 performance in The Blue Room at the Donmar Warehouse in London was famously described as “theatrical Viagra”, has been showered with awards for films such as Moulin Rouge, for which she was nominated for an Oscar. She won her Oscar this year for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours.

She is about to begin shooting Mr and Mrs Smith with Brad Pitt. They play a married couple living in the suburbs, with neither realising that the other is an assassin working for a rival organisation.

She hinted yesterday that there had been teething problems in the first week of rehearsal for Dogville. “Lars had preconceptions about me,” she said. “We went walking in the forest and had a heart-to-heart. It was a difficult few hours. We came out with a very pure commitment to each other on the basis of a three-hour warts-and-all, tears-and-screaming walk in the forest.”

Von Trier’s trilogy U, S And A was partly inspired by televised plays that he saw in the 1970s, particularly the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Nicholas Nickleby. “I’m not so crazy about theatre in the theatre, but on television or on film, it’s really something you want to see,” he said.

“At the beginning of my career, I made very ‘filmic’ films. The problem is that now, it has become too easy. All you have to do is buy a computer and you are ‘filmic’.

“You have armies rampaging over mountains, you have dragons, you just push a button. I think it was OK to be ‘filmic’ when, for instance, Kubrick had to wait two months for the light on the mountain behind Barry Lyndon when he was riding towards us.

“But if you only have to wait two seconds and then some kid with a computer fills it in . . . it’s another art form, I’m sure, but I’m not interested.”

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