Nicole Kidman, Chloe Zhao, Riley Keough among celebrities becoming death doulas
Nicole Kidman has joined the ranks of other artists who have trained to become death doulas. Often, their reasons are personal.
Nicole Kidman this week opened up about her grief at her mother’s death in 2024, which inspired her to become a death doula.
Kidman explained to a crowd at the University of San Francisco that her decision was spurred on by watching her mother’s final days.
“As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” she told the crowd. “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.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.“That’s when I went, ‘I wish there were these people in the world that were there to sit impartially and just provide solace and care.”
Kidman is not the first Hollywood figure to explore being a death doula, especially after the experience of losing a loved one.
Actor Riley Keough is the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and her brother, Benjamin, took his own life at the age of 27 in 2020. A few months later, Keough revealed on social media that she had finished death doula training.
“I think it’s so important to be educated on conscious dying and death the way we educate ourselves on birth and conscious birthing. We prepare ourselves to rigorously for the entrance and have no preparation for our exit,” she posted.
She later told The New York Times, that the training and working with people as a death doula has been helpful to her own grief. “If I can help other people, maybe I can find some way to help myself,” she said.
A death doula, also known as an end-of-life doula, is a relatively new role, having only been around since the late-1990s.
American singer and songwriter Erykah Badu became a birth doula in 2001 and later added death doula to her repertoire. She posted in 2018, “I love being part of the welcoming committee, I like laughing with those who are close to their last breath. I just want that breath to be easy”.
It works not unlike a birth doula, in that a trained professional works with a person who is facing death with issues that arise, including non-medical care, emotional support, planning and advocacy.
While there are professional training programs, death doulas are not licenced or registered, and are generally contracted through private services.
There are more people practicing as death doulas, according to Palliative Care Australia, and awareness is growing around the profession.
The American medical drama, The Pitt, featured a character who was one in a recent episode this season. In that fictional instance, it was a nurse at the hospital who also moonlights as a death doula, and she was working with a woman who had terminal cancer.
Dying for Sex, the Michelle Williams series about a woman in her 40s who had a terminal diagnosis, also featured a hospice nurse who was also a death doula.
Oscar-winning director Chloe Zhao spoke about her motivation to become a death doula in detail earlier this year while she was promoting her film, Hamnet, which portrayed one woman’s experience, a fictionalised version of Agnes Shakespeare, with grief and loss of a child.
Zhao told The New York Times that during the training, they were asked to research the death customs of indigenous cultures, which gave her the insight that grief doesn’t change no matter where or when you are.
“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,” she said.
“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.”
In speaking about her reasons for becoming a death doula, Zhao said, “I have been terrified of death my whole life. I still am. I’ve been so afraid I haven’t been able to live fully. I haven’t been able to love with my heart open because I’m so scared of losing love, which is a form of death.”
When she hit her 40s, Zhao explained that she felt her body change and that she was closer to death.
“And because I’m so scared of it, I have no choice but to start to develop a healthier relationship with it, or the second half of life would be too hard. It shouldn’t be this terrifying that I can’t even live.”
