Australian actress Nicole Kidman has paid tribute to her “compassionate” father, who died suddenly in 2014, in a candid chat with TV Week.

Speaking to the publication about her new hit television miniseries The Undoing, the 53-year-old, who plays a psychologist named Grace in the drama, said much of her insight came from observing her father’s work. Nicole’s father, Antony, who died of a heart attack inside a Singapore restaurant in September 2014 at age 75, was an Australian psychologist and academic, and ran the Health Psychology Unit at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital before his sudden death.

“He was a compassionate man, who offered to see people for nothing if they couldn’t afford to see him,” she said.

“My sister [Antonia] and I were talking recently about how lucky we were, because I would turn to my father for advice all the time, and to my mother [Janelle] too.

“I remember calling him before I went on [the West End] stage to do The Blue Room [in 1998], having a complete meltdown in terms of stage fright, and he just talked me through it on the phone. He gave me the ability to handle this industry, because it’s really tough.”

Nicole also revealed she’s felt a closeness to her Undoing co-star Donald Sutherland, who plays Grace’s supportive father in the miniseries, because he shares similarities with her father.

“Donald is my dad’s height and he reminds me of my father,” she said. “So I’d go up to him and want to just snuggle him all the time!”

The tribute comes more than a month after Nicole revealed the sudden deaths of several close family members and friends has left her terrified.

Speaking to The Sydney Morning Herald in October, the Aussie actress opened up on the sudden deaths of several close family members and friends, including her father and brother-in-law Angus Hawley, who was married to her sister Antonia from 1996 to 2007.

“I’ve been given death as a very sudden thing,” she told the publication at the time. “I’ve not nursed someone through a slow death, I’ve just had people taken. Stanley [Kubrick], my friend Robert McCann [in 2005], my father [in 2014] and my brother-in-law [Angus Hawley, in 2015] … we’ve just had people that one minute are here, and then gone.

“I’ve now had it happen repeatedly. I almost get scared saying it because I get terrified it’s going to happen again.”