Australians, already peeved at golden girl Nicole Kidman choosing to give birth in the United States, Tuesday heaped scorn on the name that the Hollywood actor and her country singer husband picked for their firstborn.
The daughter born to Kidman and fellow Australian Keith Urban on Monday in Nashville, Tennessee, has been dubbed Sunday Rose Kidman Urban.
“She just wants to fit in with the rest of the morons who choose horrible names for their children,” a reader identified only as Sam wrote to Melbourne’s Sun Herald newspaper.
A reader called Harry mused that with Sunday Rose, the glamour couple had begun a brood of diary entries: “When they have a boy they can call it Friday Night Drinks.”
There were many, and inevitable, remarks that the moniker of the 2.9-kilogram girl was very nearly Sunday Roast, and that Sunday Rose would be teased at school.
“Sunday Urban? Sounds like a cheap rail ticket for pensioners,” noted Jeff of Melbourne.
Melissa wrote to the paper that Kidman and Urban, who were married in Sydney on a Sunday in June 2006, could have made an even worse choice: “I guess it’s better than Saturday.”
Also unimpressed was Tone Nixon, whose observation was telling of his own weekend pursuits: “Way to go! Name your daughter after the most boring and usually hung-over day of the week!”
Friends of the couple, who recently sold their harbourside pad in Sydney and are busy building a palatial new family home in Nashville, say the child will be baptized a Catholic in Sydney.
Father Paul Coleman, who married them, is expected to baptize Sunday Rose later this year at the Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel on Manly Beach.
Kidman adopted children with her former husband Tom Cruise, who spend most of their time with him. They are Connor, 12, and Isabella, 14.
It was a first marriage for Urban, who has lived in the US since 1992.
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If little Sunday Rose Kidman Urban was a regular Australian child, her name would the source of endless schoolyard teasing.
But among Hollywood’s elite offspring, bizarre names reign.
Never content with common names, celebrities scour ancient Jewish texts, new age philosophy, their shopping lists and now it seems, their calendars, in order to give their children names that are every bit as creative as they are.
Sunday Rose is just the latest in the bizarre and indulgent list of names celebs have given their kids, slightly weirder than Satchel (Mia Farrow & Woody Allen) or Shiloh (Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt) but probably less traumatic than Reignbow (Ving Rhames) or Audio Science (Shannyn Sossamon).
And it’s positively pedestrian compared with the names Frank Zappa inflicted on his kids: Moon Unit, Dweezil and Diva Muffin.
The Kidman spawn is not the first famous Australian called Sunday; the name also belongs to Sunday Reed, the arts patron and wife of John Reed who helped support many of the great Australian artists of the 20th century, including Sydney Nolan and Albert Tucker.
Wednesday Addams and Friday from Robinson Crusoe are also predecessors named after days of the week.
But the inspiration behind Kidman and Urban’s choice has already got “experts” speculating.
One theory is that she was named after the day Kidman and Urban were married, Sunday, back in June 2006.
Another is that she was named after the place they celebrated Kidman’s 40th birthday, the Whitsundays.
But the best theory is surely that of baby name book author Pam Satran, who claims Kidman chose the name to “rival” Suri, the name chosen by ex-husband Tom Cruise and his wife Katie Holmes for their daughter.
Sunday was an ideal choice for this purpose because both “unusual first names begin with Su and have two syllables,” Satran told US Weekly.
The less creative ‘Rose’ follows another Hollywood trend, as a popular Hollywood middle name.
Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams’ daughter Matilda also has the middle name Rose, as do the children of Teri Hatcher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Eric Clapton.
It’s usually a safe choice, but there is a danger in little Sunday’s case of people mispronouncing her name Sunday Roast.
Even so, she could team up with little Apple Paltrow-Martin for a full Sunday spread.
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