Grief for the loss of a child is one of the strongest of human emotions, yet it’s rarely explored by Hollywood.

A brave, new film called Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman in a multi-award nominated performance, is set to rectify that.

“It’s the place you most fear to tread,” says Kidman, aged 43.

“Particularly as a parent, a mother, it’s the most terrifying place to go and exist but at the same time it’s the most important.

“Life can be very beautiful, but there’s the other end of the spectrum when it can be so painful. I wanted to honour that for people. It’s not explored that often and for me it needs to be.”

Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire, Rabbit Hole is set in suburban America and tells the story of Becca and Howie Corbett (Aaron Eckhart), a married couple struggling to return to their everyday existence several months after the death of their six-year-old boy.

Thankfully devoid of sentimentality, the film examines the way people really cope with tragedy - awkwardly, stubbornly and in fits and starts.

“A lot of times grief is dealt with a week after the loss, this is eight months and it’s about, ‘How do you live each day?”’ says Kidman, mother to four children: Isabella, 18, and Connor, 16, who she adopted with ex-husband Tom Cruise, her daughter Sunday, 2, with husband, country singer Keith Urban and their latest addition, Faith Margaret born via a surrogate on December 28 last year.

“It’s not the broad strokes, it’s the minute strokes of choosing to live each day,” she adds.

“How do you live together as a couple having had the most traumatic loss you’ll ever have? How do you still walk through each day and each hour? That’s what I love about the screenplay.”

The Australian actress was sitting in a coffee shop in Nashville where she now lives (“It’s a quiet life there, which I relish”) when she first heard of Rabbit Hole.

“I was reading a review in The New York Times of this play and it was wonderful and I thought, ‘I’d love to see that’.”

She called her producing partner [Kidman created the production company Blossom Films in 2006] and asked him to see the play that night before approaching Lindsay-Abaire.

“We got lucky,” she giggles. “We really wanted him to write the screenplay because the play’s so beautifully written, so precise, elegant and funny, and he let us option it.”

The character of Becca could be described as taciturn and aloof. But that’s not because she feels nothing, explains Kidman, rather that she’s trying to hold back the flood of emotions which threaten to engulf her life.

“I related to her stoicism,” she says. “I always approached Becca as if she’s in such enormous pain that if she even touches it she’ll break, which I think could be true of any woman who loses their child.”

She wasn’t able to attend bereaved parents meetings as part of her preparation.

“I actually tried to go to a grief group and they said, ‘No, you can’t come because you can’t have someone in the group that hasn’t been through exactly the same thing - the emotions are too raw’, which I totally respected,” reveals Kidman.

But while the actress was drawn to the subject matter, it was her husband who convinced her to tackle the weighty role of Becca.

“Keith was the one who really wanted me to make this movie,” she says.

“Sunday was one and I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this now’ and he was the one that sort of gently nudged me out of the nest.”

* Rabbit Hole is released in cinemas on Friday, February 4