After decades as a beloved leading lady in Hollywood, Nicole Kidman is taking on a new role — as a death doula.
The Oscar-winning actor, 58, shared Saturday during a talk at the University of San Francisco that she is learning how to guide people who are at the end of their life.
She said the career venture might seem “a little weird,” but explained that she was inspired to pursue it in her grief after the death of her 84-year-old mother, Janelle, in September 2024.
“As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” Kidman told the crowd, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father wasn’t in the world anymore, and that’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.’”
“So that’s part of my expansion and one of the things I will be learning,” she said. Becoming a death doula does not currently require any formal credentials, but several training courses and intensive workshops are available online and in-person.
The actor has four children, two with her ex-husband Tom Cruise and two more with her ex-husband Keith Urban. Her younger sister, 55-year-old Antonia Kidman, has six children.
Kidman previously lost her father, clinical psychologist Antony Kidman, in 2014.
A decade later, the actor learned of her mother’s death while she was at the 2024 Venice Film Festival for her film Babygirl with director Halina Reijn.
The Moulin Rouge! star has spoken openly about her grief since the loss, telling Allure last year: “Losing my mother changed every part of me. I spoke to her every second or third day. And because she was on the other side of the world, if I woke up at 5:00 a.m., I’d get up, I’d walk around the block, and I’d talk to her for an hour before the girls got up, before Keith got up. That was the rhythm of my day.”
She said at the time that she was still “raw” with grief and had to remind herself that it was okay to continue talking about it publicly, adding, “Maybe it’s my sense of what I feel I should be doing. I’m trying to be quiet and have it be a more intimate thing with just my friends or my sister.”
Kidman concluded, “I’m on the journey of grief, the year of magical thinking.”
