Although Nicole Kidman is a wonderful and gorgeous actress, she hasn’t always had it easy. For example, after she and Tom Cruise got married in 1990, Kidman had gone through many ups and downs in life.
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She mostly kept these things to herself. Finally, the couple ended their marriage in 2001. Maybe time helped heal wounds, which also caused her to finally speak up about what it was like getting married to Tom Cruise.
What Happened To Her Career
Ever since she and Cruise divorced, her career has gone higher and higher. Given her already amazing acting skills, it’s no surprise she’s been receiving multiple nominations and awards for the work she’s done.
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For example, in 2002, Kidman was given the Best Actress Oscar award for her role as Virginia Woolf in The Hours. She’s also been nominated for her roles in Rabbit Hole and Lion. In 2006, Kidman remarried and, this time, to musician Keith Urban.
A Happy Marriage
Judging by the looks of it, Kidman and Urban seem to have a successful and happy marriage, judging by how affectionate they are to each other on social media. But that’s not all! Urban seems to be a very supportive husband.
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Although Kidman’s career is bigger and sometimes eclipses her husband’s, he’s been nothing but supportive. For example, when her HBO series Big Little Lies became a smashing hit, he opened up to the Australian talk show Sunrise about how proud he was of her.
Before Urban
However, it wasn’t always like this for this beloved actress. Before she and Urban got married, she was Tom Cruise’s wife. Throughout the course of their marriage, Cruise remained more famous than Kidman.
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Actually, it’s thanks to Cruise that Kidman managed to get a big break with the movie Days of Thunder. After the Top Gun star saw her performance in the 1989 movie Dead Calm, Cruise convinced Thunder producers to offer her a role as his love interest.
Days of Thunder
1990 was the year Days of Thunder came out. Coincidentally, this was also the year Kidman and Cruise tied the knot. “[Cruise] basically swept me off my feet,” Kidman opened up in a 2002 interview with Vanity Fair.
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“I fell madly, passionately in love. And as happens when you fall in love, my whole plan in terms of what I wanted for my life— I was like, ‘Forget it. This is it.'” For a while, things seemed perfect, but we all know life is never perfect.
The Wedding
Kidman and Cruise may have looked like a perfect couple, but things weren’t always as they seem. For example, Cruise was a devout follower of the Church of Scientology. This religion believes that each human has a reactive mind that sometimes prevents us from experiencing reality due to life’s traumas.
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Anyway, when the two tied the know, the Church of Scientology was very much involved in the wedding. By then, Cruise was already so involved. Furthermore, the church’s head, David Miscavige, was even the best man.
Children
After the two were officially married, Kidman so desperately wanted to have children with Cruise. However, after a few tries, it really wasn’t meant to be. So, after experiencing a couple of fertility issues, the couple decided adoption was the best way.
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“My mother has an adopted sister, so it’s been part of our family and I knew it would probably play out somewhere in mine. I didn’t think that it would happen so early but it did,” she said during her interview with Vanity Fair back in 2007.
Adopting
So, the couple decided to adopt two kids. In 1993, they adopted a girl named Bella and a boy named Connor in 1995. Because their parents were big Hollywood stars, the siblings were also raised living the Hollywood life.
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The couple continued to star in big movies such as Mission: Impossible, Jerry Maguire, and Batman Forever. Before the decade came to a close, they also starred together in the erotic drama film Eyes Wide Shut.
A Sudden Announcement
However, Hollywood’s golden couple took everyone by surprise when they announced their separation back in February 2001. Nobody expected that, but they made things public through a statement by spokesperson Pat Kingsley.
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According to their statement, “Citing the difficulties inherent in divergent careers which constantly kept them apart, they concluded that an amicable separation seemed best for both of them at this time.”
Speculations
After the news of their sudden separation, people began to speculate as to what could have caused Kidman and Cruise to split up. Of course, these were all speculations, and nothing was true. Nonetheless, people had interesting theories.
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One media source said the reason was that Kidman wanted to spend more time in her home country of Australia, while Cruise wanted to stick in the U.S. Another rumour was that the Church of Scientology was the issue and Kidman refused to be fully immersed in it.
What Happened
Furthermore, there were also rumours that the movie Eyes Wide Shut was the main reason the pair got divorced. Apparently, the shooting schedule was intensely difficult and eventually resulted in tension between the couple.
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However, Kidman said this claim was false. During her interview with The Hollywood Reporter back in 2012, she wrote, “People thought that making the film was the beginning of the end of my marriage. But I don’t really think it was. Tom and I were close then.”
The Real Reason
Whatever the real reason for the divorce was, it seems that the infertility issues that Kidman had during their marriage really took a toll on her. Back in 2007, she opened up to Marie Claire magazine about what really happened.
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“I had a miscarriage at the end of my marriage, but I had an ectopic pregnancy at the beginning of my marriage. It was incredibly traumatic for me,” she confessed. At that point, she had already gone through a lot.
Turning Things Around
Luckily, things didn’t stay bad for Kidman in that aspect. After getting married to Keith Urban back in 2006, the couple had two more children, both of them girls. The other one was born through surrogacy.
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Their first daughter came in 2008 and the second one in 2010. Then, in 2018, as her daughters were finally starting to grow up, Kidman told Tatler magazine the impact of everything she had gone through.
The Yearning
Kidman openly talked about the many things she had gone through. For example, she also talked about her strong desire to have a child. “I know the yearning. That yearning. It’s a huge, aching yearning,” she said.
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“And the loss! The loss of a miscarriage is not talked about enough. That’s massive grief to certain women.” Because she’s unfortunately gone through both things, Kidman is certainly not a stranger to that pain.
Motherhood
“There’s an enormous amount of pain and an enormous amount of joy on the other side,” she also said. “The flipside of going through so much yearning and pain to get there is the feeling of ‘Ahhhhh!’ when you have the child.”
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Aside from that, she is a firm believer that mothers are mothers regardless of whether their children are biological or adopted. It seems Kidman’s life really has been turning around ever since her divorce from Tom Cruise.
After The Divorce
The actress also talked about how lonely she felt once the divorce was finalized. Her career may have been slowly growing bigger and bigger, but it could not compensate for the loneliness she was feeling inside her.
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Even when she had won that Oscar award for The Hours one year after the divorce, she felt hollow inside. Her heart was still set on having a child, she told the magazine. She was even fine with being a single mom, as long as she had a child.
Relating
At one point in the Tatler interview, the interview sympathized with Kidman. She shared a personal experience with the actress. As it turns out, this woman had gone through the same things Kidman had gone through.
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They wrote, “When I tell her that I also went through a divorce and also experienced issues with fertility, she is immediately empathetic. ‘And you were shattered?’ she asks as if she knows only too well what that’s like.” It certainly told much about Kidman.
Katie Holmes
Of course, just a few years after Cruise and Kidman separated, the Top Gun actor had his first biological child together with then-wife Katie Holmes—a daughter named Suri. Sadly, that marriage didn’t last long, either.
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The couple got married in 2006. Then, Holmes filed for divorce from Cruise back in 2012 and had full custody of their daughter. Once more, rumours began circulating that Scientology was also the reason for this divorce.
Divorce
Anyway, back to Kidman and Cruise. Unfortunately, it’s a fact that infertility and miscarriages tend to have a negative effect on marriages and relationships in general. In fact, studies have already proven this.
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According to a study done in Denmark in 2014, couples who had trouble conceiving especially after fertility treatment were three times more likely to break up compared to couples who faced no issues.
Kidman Now
Sadly, Kidman had to go through all of that, but now she’s come out the other side stronger. She also seems to be happy and content with how her life is going now, too, and she can now take pride in having four kids—both biological and adopted.
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Plus, her career continues to grow bigger and bigger, especially since Big Little Lies has another season coming and she also starred in Aquaman. Needless to say, Kidman has come such a long way since her divorce.