Nicole Kidman has revealed the incredible loneliness she felt when she won her Oscar because she did not have anyone to share it with.

The Moulin Rouge star won a best actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Virginia Woolf in The Hours in 2002, a year after her divorce from Tom Cruise.

Kidman, who is now married to country singer Keith Urban, said collecting the prestigious award made her want to fall in love again.

She said: " My relationship with success is a bit distant because I try to stay very much in the journey.

"Winning the Oscar was a turning point, but not in terms of my life as an actor, because it was incredibly validating, but it actually symbolised loneliness to me because I didn't have anyone to share it with at that stage in my life.

"I was like 'Wow, this means I need to get my act together and I want to fall in love' so it was weird."

Speaking at the British Film Institute alongside her co-star in her new movie Lion, Dev Patel, she added: "I am just fortunate that I am endlessly curious about human beings, I can still fall to my knees when I see great theatre, great cinema, a painting, reading a novel I never want to finish."

The Australian actress said she still has a great number of career ambitions left, including exploring another gender.

She said: "I would love to play a man at some point, I try to. I love the ability to morph. I seek out the furthermost parts of the world to go to because that is part of the journey."

She also hopes to make a screwball comedy, in the style of Lucille Ball or Carole Lombard.

"I'm drawn to black comedy and I'm drawn to satire, being Australian we like dry humour but I would love to do a screwball comedy," she said.

"I have an eight-year-old daughter who I'm sure is Lucille Ball in the making.

"She is screwball comedy and it's just delightful to have that belly laughing in the morning because she will do this weird physical thing and sounds and she is so free with her body and she loves to get a laugh, so she will do anything - and it's amazing how a child can release that in you, so now I am desperately looking for it. I don't know if I will ever get the chance.

"But you look at Carole Lombard with that screwball stuff that she did and you go 'where is that?' I would love to see that again."

Kidman and Patel both star in Lion, an adaptation of Saroo Brierley's memoir A Long Way Home, detailing his quest to find his family after he fell asleep in a train carriage in India as a child and ended up hundreds of miles from home - where he was adopted by an Australian couple.

Patel, best known for his role in Slumdog Millionaire, plays the adult Saroo, who is haunted by lurid memories of his past and uses Google Earth to find his original home, while Kidman plays his adopted mother.

Lion will be released in UK cinemas on November 25.