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Nicole Kidman

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Nicole Kidman hasn't played a famous, groundbreaking, suicidal artist in, oh, about four years. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the star of The Hours is in talks to play photographer Diane Arbus in the biopic Fur. Robert Downey Jr. is also in talks to appear in the film.

Arbus, the subject of a major retrospective opening tomorrow at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, gained fame in the 1960s for her unsettling portraits of odd and sometimes freakish individuals. She killed herself in 1971. Patricia Bosworth's Diane Arbus: A Biography is the source of the screenplay. Aptly, the movie will be made by filmmakers with a penchant for the bizarre: director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, the team behind Secretary.

Kidman has some free time on her hands, thanks to the shutdown of Eucalyptus, the love story costarring Russell Crowe that she was to have shot this spring in Australia; script squabbles among the actors, the director, and the studio put the film on indefinite hold. Shooting on Fur is to begin in May in New York.