LONDON • Nicole Kidman won the Best Actress award for her performance as a DNA researcher in the play, Photograph 51, at the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards on Sunday.

James McAvoy won Best Actor for a revival of Peter Barnes' 1968 satire The Ruling Class while Imelda Staunton took the award for Best Performance in a Musical for her portrayal of Momma Rose in a revival of the 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy.

The Oscar-winning Kidman, 48, has won rave reviews for her portrayal of Rosalind Franklin, whose use of X-ray diffraction images helped lead to the discovery of DNA's double helix structure. She had returned to the West End for the first time since 1998, when she performed in David Hare's The Blue Room.

She had said she took on the role partly as a tribute to her father, a research scientist, who died a year ago. It was also to acknowledge the work of scientists who go about their work quietly.

At Sunday's ceremony, she said she knelt before a photo of her dad for every performance in the run, which ended last Saturday, reported The Guardian. "I did this for him... he would give me the strength to do this every night."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE