Nicole Kidman wins the Coppa Volpi at the Venice Film Festival, but is absent: “My heart is broken, my mother has passed away”

Nicole Kidman won the Coppa Volpi at the 2024 Venice Film Festival for her performance in Baby Girl, an erotic thriller by Dutch director Halina Reijn. The American actress had returned to the Lido to collect the award, and was in fact intercepted this morning by photographers at the Cipriani hotel on Giudecca. However, Nicole Kidman was absent from the awards ceremony in the Sala Grande. The reason, the saddest one, was revealed by the director, reading her message: today the actress’s mother passed away , and she immediately returned to the United States.

“This award is dedicated to my mother, she has always guided me, my heart is broken,” said Halina Reijn, reading Nicole Kidman’s note. Janelle Ann Kidman was 84, and the Australian actress often cited her in her acknowledgements and speeches.

Nicole Kidman’s role in Babygirl is as modern as it is intense: “The film is about sex and desire, about our most intimate secrets, about family, about having consent, but also about truth, ambition, power, it is a liberating story about a woman in existential crisis” , the actress explained in a press conference: “The language when you talk about sex is so complicated. On the screen we see the story of a woman told without filters by another woman, through her eyes. I let myself go completely into the hands of a woman who had this profound material at her disposal”.

Babygirl tells the story of Romy, a powerful businesswoman, CEO of an automation company, two children, married to a present man (Antonio Banderas), who decides to risk everything to satisfy her desires. Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson) and it’s all about fantasies allowed and not allowed, power, women, ambition and control.