FAR BE IT from Preview to suggest that being young, free and single (again) has given a boost to her career, but Nicole Kidman certainly seems to have given it some wellie since she split from Thomas Mapother IV.

She has an Oscar nomination - her first (To Die For brought her a Golden Globe, plus awards from film critics in Boston and London and also a BAFTA nomination - but no Oscar nod). And, if she hadn’t been nominated for Moulin Rouge, she may well have been for The Others. She has had a No 1 record in the UK, singing ‘Something Stupid’ with occasional escort Robbie Williams. And, to judge by the roles Kidman has accepted in the past couple months, she must be positively fighting off the movie offers.

Of course, everyone is allowed a lapse from the limelight, and Birthday Girl - from British playwright-turned-movie director Jez Butterworth - could well be that. It was filmed well before Moulin Rouge and The Others - in the spring of 1999, to be precise - for Miramax’s short-lived British production arm, HAL Films. It then sat on the shelf for a couple of years before getting a very low-key release in the depths of February.

But it’s all uphill from there. Having played alongside Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Claire Danes and Toni Collette in Stephen Daldry’s The Hours (a near-certainty for Cannes), Kidman is about to start shooting the new Lars von Trier movie, Dogville, scotching rumours last summer that she had pulled out of it. She goes straight from that to starring opposite Anthony Hopkins in Robert Benton’s movie adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, in which she plays a withdrawn young woman working as a cleaner who is sexually drawn to Hopkins’ much older college professor.

After that, her next potential role could hardly be more different: that of the 12th-century Eleanor (aka Aliénor) of Acquitaine in Court and Spark, an original screenplay which is being produced by Kidman’s manager, Alan Howard. Eleanor brought off the not inconsiderable achievement of being first Queen of France, then Queen of England, which she managed by getting the Pope to annul her marriage to Louis VII so that she could wed Henri Plantagenet, Duke of Normandy, who subsequently became Henry II of England. Apparently being Queen of England was more fulfilling than being Queen of France.

Also on Kidman’s to-do list is Jane Campion’s upcoming film, In the Cut, based on an erotic thriller by Susanna Moore, which she will executive produce (they apparently started talking about it while Campion was directing Kidman in Portrait of a Lady). The film, which is set to start shooting in New York in July, will star Meg Ryan as a writing teacher with an adventurous after-hours life who gets sexually involved with a detective investigating a series of local murders. The latter role has yet to be cast.

One thing it doesn’t look like Kidman will be doing, however, is the comedy (mentioned in the January issue) in which Jim Carrey would have played a widower whose attempts to start a new relationship are thwarted by the ghost of his ex-wife (Kidman). That film - which still didn’t have a title but was supposed to start this month (March) - was shelved in mid-January by Universal. It may still happen, though, since both Kidman and Carrey are believed to be very keen on the script by Gary Ross, who wrote Big and directed Pleasantville.

SPIELBERG'S GHOST

AND WHAT OF Mr Cruise? Well, he’s been pencilled in as the lead of Paramount’s The Bridge, about a guy trying to come to terms with his life after he is fired. And he’s just finished one of those projects Steven Spielberg toys with for years before finally making - a list which, incidentally, no longer includes directing Memoirs of a Geisha. That’s something he started toying with at the end of 1998, right after the book came out, but finally decided in February that he would merely produce the film.

Before The Bridge, however, will come the lead role in Ed Zwick’s The Last Samurai, in which Tom Cruise will play an American who is hired by the Japanese Emperor in the 19th century to train modern soldiers to replace the samurai warriors. And the movie he has just finished with Spielberg is Minority Report, which first surfaced in the spring of 1999. Based on the novel by Philip K Dick (best known to moviegoers for writing the stories on which Blade Runner and Total Recall were based), it’s about a cop in a future society whose job is to arrest criminals before they commit the crime. The film, which also stars Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow and Samantha Morton, is due to be released in the US by Fox on June 21.

Warner Bros, meanwhile, has acquired the rights to yet another Dick project, A Scanner Darkly, about a narcotics officer who is also an addict and has a paranoid alter ego called Fred. After a while, he stops being able to tell which one he is.

Then in January, Cruise and Spielberg announced a new project called Ghost Soldiers, which takes the latter back to World War II after a couple of sci-fi outings. It is about the US troops captured by the Japanese on Bataan, who went on an enforced ‘death march’ before spending three years as POWs.

The film is, in the current Hollywood tradition, one of three major movies scheduled to deal with Bataan. The other two are at Miramax (with Benjamin Bratt as star), and Columbia, where David Fincher is reportedly in line to direct a screenplay by William Nicholson.

LOOKING FOR QUENTIN

AT CANNES LAST year, a favourite journalistic pastime was ‘Looking for Quentin’, since the once-prolific young director was rumoured to be in town, talking projects. Quentin Tarantino did indeed show up one night at Le Petit Majestic (not the most obvious place for keeping a low profile), in the somewhat unlikely company of structuralist academic Colin McCabe and festival director-turned-producer Lizzie Franke. But the nature of the ‘projects’ was not revealed.

Having nabbed the Palme d’Or in 1994 with Pulp Fiction, Tarantino has yet to make an ‘official’ return to the Croisette. Since then, he has directed only one feature (the underperforming Jackie Brown), executive produced From Dusk Till Dawn and its two sequels and cameoed in Dusk director Robert Rodriguez’s Once Upon a Time in Mexico: Desperado 2, which is due out from Miramax some time next year.

In the interim, his name has been attached to various projects, the most intriguing of which was a remake of Modesty Blaise starring Uma Thurman. But nothing happened - until now, that is. Production is finally just about to start on Kill Bill, in which Thurman will star (shooting was apparently delayed to enable her to have her baby), alongside the usual eclectic mix of Hollywood names that Tarantino (still) seems to be able to attract to his pictures, including Daryl Hannah, Warren Beatty and Lucy Liu. He also wrote the screenplay for Kill Bill, which is described as a gritty film noir, with Thurman and Hannah playing the chief adversaries.