I’m not a girl who likes getting her hands dirty. Yet I’m forever scrubbing my nails of grime that seems to accumulate throughout the day. Nicole, on the other hand, is the opposite. I have seen her in the dirtiest and dustiest of roles (Cold Mountain, Australia, which I saw last night – more on that in a minute) and yet her nails always remain super-annoyingly pristine. It’s like they have their own clause in her contract. Somewhere near the one that goes “My facial muscles must not be expected to move more than 10 degrees” there’s probably one that reads “Under no circumstance shall my cuticles be forced into any kind of stressful situation.”

So to Australia. Wow, is all I can say. It’s epic and mystical and quirky all at once. It’s just beautiful to watch and fascinating to follow. Hugh is damn hot, Nicole is (surprisingly) funny and endearing, and Brandon Walters, who plays the adorable half-aboriginal child Nullah, is surely in the running for an Oscar nomination. And then the sets, and the costumes, and the camera work … Well it’s Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin, so as you’d expect the attention to detail is just perfection. Perhaps though they could have done without so much of the on-set manicurist.

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