As an award-winning actress, Nicole Kidman is used to being in the
spotlight and sharing parts of her life with the world. But when it comes to
her former marriage with actor Tom Cruise, the actress prefers to keep their
history (and divorce) private.
When asked by Harper's Bazaar if
she felt discouraged by the media scrutiny around her divorce from Cruise,
Kidman chalked it up to her age at the time. "I was young. I think I offered
it up?" she said with a laugh.
Kidman and Cruise met in 1989 just before they starred in Days
of Thunder together. The former couple married six months later in 1990, and
were together for 11 years until Cruise filed for divorce citing
"irreconcilable differences" in February 2001.
Kidman said her
approach to sharing certain parts of her life has shifted throughout her
decades-long career in the spotlight. "Maybe I've gotten a bit more
trepidatious, but I’m always trying to be as open as possible," she told
Harper's Bazaar. "I just prefer to live in the world that way."
But just because she's private doesn't mean she's aloof. "I'm
wary at times, and I've been hurt, but at the same time I much prefer a warm
approach rather than a prickly shutdown approach," she continued. "My
husband, Keith, says that when he met me, he said, 'How's your heart?' And I
apparently responded, 'Open.'"
Kidman and Keith Urban met in
January of 2005 at G'Day LA, an event honoring Australians in the
entertainment business. They started dating a few months later and
eventually married in June 2006. Kidman said Urban gave a speech at the
event in which he reflected on his mother and her sister, who was sitting
right next to the Big Little Lies actress, Kidman recalled in the Bazaar
interview.
"Well, it doesn't get much better than that," Urban's aunt had
said, according to Kidman. "Yeah, but he's not gonna be interested in me,"
Kidman replied. But in the end, he really was. The actress said "angels"
helped set them up in the months to come. "I was really, really into him,"
she said of the country music star. "He took a little time."
Kidman
previously wrote in an essay for The Cut that she was "reluctant" to discuss
her former marriage to Cruise in the media because of her current
relationship with Urban.
"It almost feels disrespectful [to
Keith]," she wrote. "That said, I got married very young, but it definitely
wasn't power for me—it was protection. … When I came out of [the marriage to
Cruise] at 32, 33, it's almost like I had to grow up."
Today, though, Kidman is never shy about gushing over Urban.
The two have been married for 15 years and have two kids together, Faith and
Sunday.
"He's such a good man, as I've said before," Kidman told
Today of her husband. "I'm married to a really good man. And the kids have a
great father and that's a very beautiful thing to be able to say."
