KANTS, IVOR (KANTZ, IVAR; KANTS, IVAR) (1949– ). Ivor Kants has acted in the theater and on screen, in both television and film, although he is probably more well known for his television characters. He is of Latvian descent, and is a graduate of the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Two television films began his career, The Puzzle (1978) and Peter Weir’s early thriller The Plumber (1979), in which he played the plumber, disrupting and terrorizing a housewife. Lead roles followed in quick succession: in Brothers (1982), Moving Out (1983), the Thomas Kenneally-written Silver City (1984), Tim Burstall’s The Naked Country (1984), Jenny Kissed Me (1986), with Geoffrey Rush in Twelfth Night (1987), Gallagher’s Travels (1987), Edge of Power (1987), and You and Me and Uncle Bob (1993). None of these films reached the heights of commercial or artistic success, and Kants continued working in television up to 1994. He appeared in the unexciting Counterstrike (2003), a television film.
KARVAN, CLAUDIA (1972– ). Unlike other Australians who have left Australia to pursue careers overseas, Claudia Karvan has been happy to remain in Australia, honing her considerable talents and ability across a range of characters and genres. As well as a relatively long and fruitful career on the big screen, she has a long list of television credits. Acting has been a part of her life since childhood; she made her first appearance in Going Down (1983) as a disgruntled child. She first appeared in a lead role in Hightide (1987) as Ally, a teenager living in a caravan on the coast of New South Wales, torn between her alcoholic mother—played by Judy Davis—who had abandoned her, and her grandmother, who had been looking after her since that time.
Karvan excels in comedy, and in the romantic comedy The Big Steal (1990), she played the young girl to whom Danny (Ben Medelsohn) is attracted. As an Australian of Greek descent in The Heartbreak Kid (1993), she played a high school teacher who falls in love with one of her students, and depicts the trials and tribulations of this love, which is rather tragic. However, if the roles were reversed—if the film were about a young male teacher who fell in love with a female student—the representation of the situation and the audience reception of the film would have been arguably quite different. In the comedy Dating the Enemy (1996), Karvan exchanged bodies with her sexist ex-boyfriend, who experiences the travails of the female world. Paul Cox has directed her in a number of films, including the comedy Lust and Revenge (1996), written by Cox and *John Clarke. In the romantic comedy Paperback Hero (1998), Karvan (Ruby Vale) played opposite Hugh Jackman (Jack Willis) as the alleged author of romance novels, which, in fact, the truck-driving Jackman wrote. As a country woman, Karvan is independent, strong, and although lacking the graces of an urbanite, makes up for it with her exuberance and joie de vivre. With Naomi Watts, Hugo Weaving, and Tom Long, she played one of the three women living together in Sydney and three male friends in the otherwise inconsequential romantic comedy Strange Planet (1999).
Karvan works effectively in other genres. Redheads (1992) provided her first lead in a thriller, where she is an inmate who has an affair with a lawyer, who is later murdered. The short, erotic, Paul Cox film, Touch Me (1993), shows Karvan in the role of a lover. Perhaps her best role to date was the corrupt lawyer Louise Roncoli, playing opposite Tom Long and corrupt insurance assessor John Kriesky (Bryan Brown) in the cynical Risk (2000).
Other films include Molly (1983), Phillip Noyce’s Echoes of Paradise (1987), Holidays on the River Yarra (1990), Broken Highway (1993), The Nostradamus Kid (1993), Exile (Paul Cox 1994), Natural Justice: Heat (1996), Flynn (1996), Two Girls and a Baby (1998), and Passion (1999).
KENNEDY, BYRON (1952–1983). Until his accidental death in a helicopter accident in 1983, in Warragamba Dam, New South Wales, Byron Kennedy was the other half in the Kennedy Miller production-direction team responsible for Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2: Road Warrior (1981) (see MILLER, DR. GEORGE). These films had their genesis in Violence in the Cinema Part One, produced by Kennedy and written and directed by Miller, an unsettling film that exploited the potential of cinematography, location, editing, and mise-en-scene; potential that reached fruition in the Mad Max films. Kennedy acted in The Office Picnic (1972), was cinematographer for Come Out Fighting (1973), and produced Last of the Knucklemen (1979). He also produced the television miniseries Cowra Breakout (1984) and The Dismissal (1983).
The Australian Film Institute established the Byron Kennedy Award in 1983 to recognize an individual working in any area of Australian film or television—usually early in their career—whose work is marked by excellence.
KENNEDY MILLER PRODUCTIONS. Byron Kennedy and Dr. George Miller established the Kennedy Miller production company in 1972. The pair had met in the summer of 1969 at a film course run by the Australian Union of Students at Melbourne University. After Kennedy had gone on to work as an actor and cinematographer in the film industry and Miller had completed his medical training in Sydney, they met again and founded the company. Miller’s medical career was to help finance the company’s productions for some time to come. Kennedy quickly settled into the role of producer, while Miller concentrated on writing and directing. In 1975 Miller and James McCausland wrote the script for Mad Max (1979). Because it was a genre picture, rather than the kind of art cinema then being financed by government, Kennedy and Miller organized financing for the film themselves, from the distributor Roadshow and a syndicate of 20 investors. Following the international success of this film, the much bigger and more expensive sequel, Mad Max 2 (1982), was easier to finance (see also MAD MAX TRILOGY). For this film, Terry Hayes joined the production team as a scriptwriter. Hayes went on to write much of the company’s first television miniseries, The Dismissal (1982).
In 1983, Byron Kennedy was killed in a helicopter crash, yet despite this blow, Kennedy Miller continued to grow as a company, gaining a reputation in the 1980s as a leading Australian producer of quality TV miniseries. Its credits include: Bodyline (1983), The Cowra Breakout (1984), and Vietnam (1986). Films produced by Kennedy Miller and directed by Dr. George Miller include: Mad Max, Mad Max 2, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (codirector, 1985), and Babe: Pig in the City (1998). Films the company has produced (but that were not directed by Miller) include: Heaven Before I Die (1997), Babe (1995), Flirting (1991), Dead Calm (1989), and The Year My Voice Broke (1987).
KIDMAN, NICOLE (1967– ). Born in Hawaii to a nursing instructor mother and a biochemist and psychologist father—both Australians—Nicole Kidman spent the first three years of her life in the United States, near Washington, D.C. The family returned to Australia where Kidman learned ballet and participated in school theatrical presentations. By the age of 15, she had appeared in small roles in the successful Bush Christmas (1983) and BMX Bandits (1983) and was a regular in the television series Five Mile Creek, which gave her the time and developed her confidence in front of the camera. Her talent and compelling screen presence even then was noticed and roles in other films followed in quick succession. Wills & Burke (1985) was a lampoon of historical epics, Windrider (1986) was a teenage film about a surfer who built a high-tech surfboard. However, a part in the Kennedy Miller television miniseries Vietnam (1986)—directed by John Duigan—was a watershed in this early part of her career as her ability was affirmed in the Australian Film Institute award for best leading actress. Terry Hayes wrote the miniseries, and he was so impressed that he wrote the part of Rae Ingram in Phillip Noyce’s thriller Dead Calm (1989) with her in mind. Although only 19, Kidman played the part of a 30 plus year old woman grieving for her lost child. She then reverted to a snotty teenager in John Duigan’s Flirting (1991), working with Noah Taylor and Thandie Newton. It was the last Australian film she made, although she went on to work with Australian directors like *Jane Campion and Baz Luhrmann.
Dead Calm brought her to the notice of the international art-house circuit and to Tom Cruise, who invited her to work with him in Hollywood on Days of Thunder (1990), and with whom she was subsequently married. Film parts followed rapidly, although none matched the success of her earlier work. With Dustin Hoffman, she played a society girl in the period drama Billy Bathgate (1991); with Cruise she appeared as Drew Preston in Ron Howard’s epic Far and Away (1992). Two films in 1995 revealed the range in the spectrum of her work. In Batman Forever she played the part of Bruce Wayne’s (Val Kilmer) romantic interest, and in the satirical To Die For, Kidman played a television weather girl who will do anything to succeed, a role which generated a degree of gender-aligned, and mean-spirited controversy about whether she was playing a role, or just playing herself. Jane Campion made her audition for the role of Isabel Archer in the film version of Henry James novel The Portrait of a Lady (1996), but her ability shone through the sometimes uneven direction. The role of Dr. Julia Kelly opposite George Clooney followed in the action thriller The Peacemaker (1997).
With Cruise, she played the part of a wife who confesses having a sexual fantasy with another man, starting a series of responses from her husband (Cruise), and marking the disintegration of a relationship, in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). In a completely different role, she played the beautiful courtesan Satine in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001), for which she was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe. Exploiting her icy reserve, Kidman played the high-strung mother living in isolation in World War II in The Others (2001). The marriage with Cruise broke down in 2001, but Kidman’s work continued unabated. In Australia, where she now spends much of her time, the women’s pulp press had a field day with the breakup, labeling Kidman as the innocent, wounded victim “our Nic” and demonizing Cruise as the womanizing bounder who broke her heart. Generous critical acclaim followed her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours (2002), where she costarred with Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep, and further down the cast list, Australian Toni Collette. Kidman won an Academy Award, a British Academy for the Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award, and a Golden Globe for best performance in a leading role. Audiences were divided over the film, however.
Other films include, Archer’s Adventure (1985), Watch the Shadows Dance (1987), The Bit Part (1987), Emerald City (1988), Malice (1993), My Life (1993), The Leading Man (1996), Practical Magic (1998), Birthday Girl (2001), Dogville (2003), The Human Stain (2003), Cold Mountain (2003).