Celebrity News

Orangutan’s strange obsession with Nicole Kidman

It appears Keith Urban has some serious competition.

Turns out, there’s another handsome lad with his eyes on Aussie actress Nicole Kidman and he just happens to be much stronger and bigger than her country crooner husband.

There’s only one problem. He’s a 95kg Sumatran orangutan.

Meet Hsing Hsing, the alpha male organgutan at Perth’s Zoo who has big crush on the glamorous 47-year-old.

The lovable primate, who celebrated his 39th birthday over the weekend, apparently has a fetish for redheads, his keepers have revealed, in particular, the flame-haired Grace of Monaco star.

Hsing Hsing’s connection with the actress, who shares 95 per cent of his DNA, is so strong that he often tears out pictures of Nicole from magazines thrown in his enclosure.

“He’s definitely interested- it’s amazing,” primate supervisor Holly Thompson told AAP.

“He understands that he’s attracted to a lovely redhead female orangutan and then he sees a lovely redhead in a magazine and goes, ‘oh yeah, close enough – Nicole Kidman, I’m going to rip that page out and put it to one side’.”

Holly also revealed that Hsing Hsing has other weird, but wonderful behaviours, not often seen in other Orangutans.

The handsome creature will share his food with close pal Utama, a 35-year-old female orangutan.

“Because he’s a diabetic, we need to know what food he’s having. If he misses some, we supplement it with some more, and so Utama knows how to work him,” Holly said.

Sadly, the orangutan is one of the most threatened of all the large apes.

Ms Thompson, who has visited Indonesia to see the destruction of orangutan habitat for palm oil, rubber and acacia plantations, says the plight of the orangutans is probably worse than imagined.

Related stories