Nicole Kidman

Tall, slender and ethereally beautiful, this stunning actress (who was born in the U.S. but raised Down Under) began performing as a teen and was already well known in Australia when she came to Hollywood to costar with Tom Cruise in the 1990 racing flick Days of Thunder. Within months the couple was married and the 23-year-old became an overnight sensation — albeit more due to her status as Mrs. Cruise than her talent. Undaunted and ambitious, Kidman took on a variety of roles in all genres of films, although most were unsuccessful: thrillers (Malice), tearjerkers (My Life), historical epics (Far and Away, opposite her husband) and one blockbuster (Batman Forever). But it was her seductive turn as a wickedly aspiring newscaster in the 1995 black comedy To Die For that proved she was more than a pretty face and perfect body. Kidman worked steadily for the rest of the decade and collaborated once more with Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut. But in 2001 their 11-year marriage very publicly fell apart as her career heated up, with an Oscar-nominated role in the musical extravaganza Moulin Rouge and a critically lauded performance as a ghost-plagued mother in The Others. The next year, with a little help from the makeup department, Kidman buried her beauty under a prosthetic nose and brown wig to play troubled British author Virginia Woolf in The Hours and won an Academy Award for her portrayal. The star was doing better than ever sans Cruise — and having a lot more fun, too, with a string of high-profile romances (Lenny Kravitz, Keith Urban). Not even missteps such as the tepid comedies Stepford Wives and Bewitched could tarnish her A-list reputation. In June 2006, she walked down the aisle a second time, marrying country musician Urban in their Aussie homeland.