Will Nicole Kidman quit film?

Nicole Kidman attended the premiere of what might be her last film, an epic about her native country called Australia, in Sydney on Tuesday night. As reported here yesterday, the 41-year-old Australian actress has suggested that she will quit cinema so that she can focus on being a mother and perhaps have another child - she and her husband, Keith Urban, already have one daughter, Sunday Rose, and Kidman has two adopted children from her first marriage to Tom Cruise.

According to critics, Australia, which centres on a love affair between an upper-class English woman, played by Kidman, and a taciturn cattleman (Hugh Jackman), would not be the best film to bow out with.

Bonnie Malkin, the Daily Telegraph's critic, summed the plot up thus: "An uptight English aristrocrat who gets her knickers in a knot over the brutish behaviour of the unreconstructed Australian male". Talking about the leading lady, she added: "Nicole Kidman's ridiculous Lady Sarah Ashley fulfils another ashamed stereotype – that of the witless Brit abroad." ·