Nicole Kidman believes she has the right “personality type” to be a death doula.
Nicole Kidman is training to be a death doula
The Babygirl actress recently revealed she is training to learn how to support people and their loved ones during their final days because of her and her sister Antonia’s experiences before their mom, Janelle Ann Kidman, passed away in September 2024 at the age of 84, and she has now revealed she is finding her studies “fascinating”.
Asked about the subject during a HISTORYTalks event in Philadelphia over the weekend, she said: “It’s helping people in the end stage of life. It’s helping the families. It’s being present, impartial.
“I think it’s fascinating. It’s, it’s a really fascinating, it’s very beautiful and you have to be a certain personality to be able to do it, but I found out that I’m actually that personality.”
The 58-year-old actress’ desire to be a death doula is “very important” to her and she is happy she will be able to support people during such a difficult time.
She said: “It’s very important to me. There is always suffering in life, right? But if there [are] people there who can help with that and can help those final stages be less painful, you can feel the connection and the love, then that is a lovely thing to be able to do. So that’s what I’m exploring.”
Nicole believes death doulas are a “huge necessity” in modern life because of longer life expectancies, as well as the “loneliness” some experience and “the way in which people are treated in [that] stage of life.”
The Big Little Lies star revealed earlier this month that she was undergoing death doula training.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Nicole said during a Silk Speaker Series talk at the University of San Francisco’s War Memorial Gym: “As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide.
“Between my sister and I, we have so many children and our careers and our work, and wanting to take care of her because my father wasn’t in the world anymore, and that’s when I went, ‘I wish there was these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.’
“So that’s part of my expansion and one of the things I will be learning.”
The Babygirl actress isn’t the only famous face to reveal plans to be a death doula.
In 2021, Riley Keough revealed she had undergone training and found supporting others proved to be helpful with her own grief over her brother Benjamin Keough taking his own life in July 2020.
The Daisy Jones and the Six star – whose mom Lisa Marie Presley died in January 2023 – said: “That’s really what’s helped me, being able to put myself in a position of service. If I can help other people, maybe I can find some way to help myself.”
And director Chloe Zhao recently revealed she had been training to be a death doula to help her overcome her own fears about the end of life.
She told the New York Times newspaper: “I just finished Level 1 training in the UK. In one of the training sessions, we had to research Indigenous cultures from around the world, how they deal with death and dying both today and in the past.
“You can see that the grief of losing a loved one doesn’t change.
“However, the societal understanding of death and the space it gives to grief and how it’s embedded in the culture and the medicalisation of death have shifted so much. In the modern world, when death is no longer seen as a natural part of life — because now it’s about staying alive as long as we can — there’s almost shame around death.”
The Hamnet filmmaker was then asked why she had undertaken the training and explained her fear of death had been so debilitating, she had been unable to “live fully”.
