Nicole Kidman’s late mother advised her against giving up acting completely following the birth of her daughter Sunday in 2008.
The Australian actress thought she was “pretty much done” with acting and was considering giving up her job to live on a farm in Nashville and raise Sunday with her husband Keith Urban.
However, she changed her mind after her mother, Janelle Ann, advised her not to step away from Hollywood entirely.
“When I gave birth to (Sunday), I was like, ‘Well, I think I’m pretty much done now,'” Kidman told CBS News. “We were living on a farm, and that’s when my mother said, ‘I wouldn’t give up completely. Keep a finger sort of in it.’ And I’m like, ‘No, no. I’m done now. I’m done.’ She’s going, ‘Just listen to me. Keep moving forward. Not saying that you have to do it to the level you’ve been doing it, but I wouldn’t give it up completely.'”
Kidman, who welcomed another daughter named Faith in 2010, took her mother’s advice and is now more prolific than ever. She was in three movies this year – Babygirl, Spellbound and A Family Affair – and the TV shows Lionness and The Perfect Couple.
Explaining her mother’s reasoning, the Moulin Rouge! star added, “That came from a woman who was from a generation that didn’t have the opportunities that I had, that she had helped create for her daughters. So that’s probably something that she wished she’d had when she was little.”
The actress lost her mother in September at the age of 84. Before she died, Janelle encouraged her daughter to “take care” of herself.
“I’m doing that more, and I say that to other people in the world. Particularly women. I think we tend not to care of ourselves. We take care of everybody else but the last person is here,” she said.
Her erotic thriller Babygirl will be released in the U.S. on Christmas Day and in the U.K. on 10 January.
