"We're pretty shattered right now," the 47-year-old Hollywood star says. "Nobody can prepare you for it."

Her father was visiting her sister Antonia in Singapore when he died of an apparent heart attack in September. He was 75.

"It was awful," Nicole says. "It's been a pretty rocky road for the past month."

With husband Keith Urban and daughters Sunday Rose and Faith in tow, she came home to Sydney for the funeral at St Francis Xavier Church in Lavender Bay on September 19.

"A lot of the huge landmarks in my life have happened there," she says down the phone line from Nashville, where Sunday is running in and out of the room playing dress-ups and demanding to know what's for dinner (it's salmon). "My wedding, my father's funeral, all my childhood, obviously."

Since her teens, many of those key moments have been played out in the public eye, but Kidman insists her experiences are no different to anyone else's.

"I'm on the same natural course as any other 47-year-old woman – weddings, divorces, loss of parents, birth of children. Mine gets mapped out while others go through it silently or privately, but we're all going through it."

Right now she's on the promotional trail for her latest film, the psychological thriller Before I Go to Sleep – the second film in the past year in which she has been paired with Colin Firth (the other being The Railway Man) – and the reception has, thankfully, been a little kinder than to her last outing, in the widely panned Grace of Monaco.

The critical mauling the film took hit her hard, she admits, but it won't deter her from taking chances in the future.

"I will never not keep trying," she says defiantly. "That's something my father taught me very early on. And it's an important part of someone artistically – you try things.

"And if they don't work, do you run away? No, I don't think so. Not if you have a choice."

 Nicole Kidman: the interview S cover story