Nicole Kidman in the action-thriller "The Peacemaker" (1997) as White House nuclear expert Dr. Julia Kelly, opposite George Clooney. The film grossed $110,000,000 worldwide. In 1998, she co-starred with Sandra Bullock in the poorly received fantasy "Practical Magic" as a modern-day witch. Kidman returned to her work on stage the same year in the David Hare play "The Blue Room", which opened in London. In 1999, Kidman reunited with then husband, Tom Cruise, to portray a married couple in "Eyes Wide Shut", the final film of director Stanley Kubrick. The film was subject to censorship controversies due to the explicit nature of
Stanley Kubrick noted that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, the "Aryan Papers", having spent years researching the subject. Most of Kubrick's friends and early photography and film collaborators were Jewish, and his first two marriages were to daughters of recent Jewish immigrants from Europe. British screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who worked closely with Kubrick in his final years, believes that the originality of Kubrick's films was partly because he "had a (Jewish?) respect for scholars". He declared that it was "absurd to try to understand Stanley Kubrick without reckoning on Jewishness as a fundamental aspect of his mentality". Walker