Nearly 25 years after Nicole Kidman’s marriage to Tom Cruise came to an end, the actor is looking back at how quickly she went from a young Hollywood newcomer to the wife of one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
Long before Nicole Kidman, 59, became an Oscar-winning star, she and Tom Cruise, 64, were one of Hollywood’s hottest couples, with a romance that moved almost as quickly as her career.
The pair met when Kidman auditioned for Days of Thunder, the 1990 racing movie that starred Cruise as NASCAR driver Cole Trickle.
Kidman was only 22 when filming started and still relatively new to Hollywood, and years later, she admitted Cruise made quite the first impression.
“I remember walking in, I remember being so nervous and seeing Tom Cruise drive up in a Porsche, I think it was,” she told People in 2016. “He got out of the car and walked through and I was like, ‘Ah.’ My jaw dropped.”
She got the role – and Cruise.
By Christmas Eve that year, Kidman and Cruise were married, and she suddenly found herself navigating a level of fame unlike anything she had previously experienced.
The couple went on to adopt two children, Bella and Connor, and appeared together in movies including Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut before announcing their separation in February 2001.
Their divorce was finalized that August, ending their marriage after more than a decade together.
‘Disrespectful’ to talk about Cruise
In the years that followed, Kidman occasionally reflected on her first marriage, but once she built another life with country star Keith Urban, she became particularly reluctant to revisit it publicly.
Kidman married Urban in 2006, and by 2018, she made it clear that her hesitation had little to do with denying her past with Cruise.
“Being married to Tom Cruise at 22 is something I’m always reluctant to talk about, because I’m married now to the man who is my great love, and it almost feels disrespectful,” the Aussie actor told New York Magazine.
When she did address those years, however, Kidman acknowledged how dramatically the marriage shaped her experience as a young woman finding her way through Hollywood.
“That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me – it was protection,” she continued. “I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed.”
Kidman described herself as “very much cocooned” during those years, adding that when she emerged from the marriage in her early 30s, “it’s almost like I had to grow up.”
She has also looked back on the relationship without dismissing what came from it, particularly the two children she and Cruise share.
“[It was] a beautiful marriage and all of those things that came out of it,” Kidman previously told People. “Two beautiful children. The rest is history.”
Another marriage comes to an end
For almost two decades, Kidman’s life was instead intertwined with Urban.
The pair married in 2006 and welcomed daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret, but in September 2025, news emerged that their 19-year marriage was coming to an end.
Their divorce was finalized in January 2026.
Kidman has largely avoided discussing the specifics of the split, although she recently acknowledged that the life she finds herself living now is not the one she had pictured.
“I didn’t expect this. I had a different view of what my life was going to be, but this is what it is now,” she told British Vogue in a recent interview. “You make all these plans, and you have all these ideas of what it’s all going to be like and then it’s…not. You have to adjust, you adapt.”
And that same interview has now brought Kidman back to a relationship she once admitted she was reluctant to discuss while married to Urban.
‘We just fell madly in love’
Almost 25 years after her divorce from Cruise was finalized, Kidman is speaking candidly about just how young she was when their whirlwind romance transformed her life.
“I got married so young. Suddenly I was 22, 23 years old and I had this huge movie star husband,” Kidman recalled in the British Vogue article, set to hit stands in September 2026.
For all the attention and consequences that came with marrying one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Kidman remembers her decision at the time as surprisingly uncomplicated.
“But it just seemed completely natural. We just fell madly in love, and it was that simple,” she said.
People around her were already warning that becoming Mrs. Tom Cruise could change the trajectory of her own emerging career, but Kidman wasn’t interested in hearing it.
“I remember people saying to me, ‘OK, well this is really going to affect your career.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t care. I’m in love. I want to be married,’” she shared.
Those warnings didn’t disappear after the wedding, particularly as Kidman found herself increasingly viewed through the enormous fame of the man she had married.
“And then I was his ‘wife’ and they were like, ‘See, we told you.’ I’m like, ‘So what? I wasn’t meant to marry the man I love? Of course I’ll throw my career away. I don’t care,’” the Moulin Rouge! star told Vogue.
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