Nicole Kidman inspired after playing Martha Gellhorn

Nicole Kidman was inspired to take up writing after playing famed war reporter Martha Gellhorn in TV movie Hemingway & Gellhorn.

The Australian actress admits shooting the project with Clive Owen as Gellhorn's husband Ernest Hemingway reignited her own interest in creative writing.

She tells the Daily Telegraph newspaper, "I write for myself - it's my way of letting myself go. It's purging. I first stumbled into it as a teenager."

Kidman was so passionate about the news as a child, she told her clinical psychologist father she dreamed of becoming a reporter.

She recalls, "When I was 10, I would say to my father, 'I want to be a journalist.' The thing he least wanted me to be was an actress. I still haven't received that approving nod!"