Though it’s been over for decades, Nicole Kidman’s marriage to Tom Cruise is still one of Hollywood’s most-talked about relationships.
While Kidman has grown to keep her private life out of the spotlight, things were different when she wed Cruise in 1990. “I was young. I think I offered it up?” she told Harper’s Bazaar in September 2021 of publicly discussing her first marriage. “Maybe I’ve gotten a bit more trepidatious, but I’m always trying to be as open as possible. I just prefer to live in the world that way.”
It was not the first marriage for Cruise, who was wed to Mimi Rogers from 1987 to 1990. About 10 months after his divorce, Cruise married Kidman in December 1990. They adopted two children — Isabella (born 1992) and Connor (born 1995) — before Cruise filed for divorce in February 2001.
“I was willing to give up everything,” Kidman told Vanity Fair in November 2002. “I now see that as part of me. I’m willing to do that — I do it when I do a movie too. I’m willing to go, ‘Yeah, bring it on, consume me, intoxicate me.’ I want to feel alive — I want to reel, basically. I was reeling with Tom and I loved it and I would have walked to the end of the earth. That meant giving up a lot of things that were very important to me.”
The Oscar winner reflected on the heightened pressure of being in the public eye, adding, “I felt I didn’t deserve to be there in my own right, and so throughout I wasn’t there as Nicole — I was there as Tom’s wife.”
Both remarried after their split. Kidman was briefly engaged to Lenny Kravitz before she wed Keith Urban in June 2006. Cruise, for his part, settled his divorce from Katie Holmes in July 2012 after six years of marriage.
Scroll down to see Cruise and Kidman’s most candid quotes about their marriage and split:
Nicole Kidman in May 2001
“I think that divorce is hard for anyone. It’s a nightmare, it just is, and you can pretend you’re fine,” Kidman said in an emotional interview shortly after her marriage to Cruise was officially dissolved. “And days you’re great [and] days you’re not great.”
Nicole Kidman in November 2002
The Boy Erased star felt like her “life collapsed” after going through her public split, she told Vanity Fair. “He basically swept me off my feet. I fell madly, passionately in love,” she recalled. “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.’ I was consumed by it, willingly. And I was desperate to have a baby with him. I didn’t care if we were married. That’s what I wish I’d done.”
Nicole Kidman in January 2009
Kidman opened up about following in Cruise’s shadow throughout their marriage, telling Easy Living, “I felt I became a star only by association. We would go to the Oscars and I would think, ‘I’m here to support him.’ I felt it was my job to put on a beautiful dress and be seen and not heard.”
Nicole Kidman in November 2012
Before they called it quits, the Cold Mountain star thought her life with Cruise was “perfect.” She told DuJour magazine, “It took me a very long time to heal. It was a shock to my system. We were in a bubble, just the two of us. We became very dependent on one another.”
At the time, she called herself “impulsive and naïve” for jumping into a marriage so young.
Nicole Kidman in September 2016
During an interview with Red Book magazine, Kidman compared her early career to that of Taylor Swift, who frequently made headlines for her love life. “I was so young when I got married,” the actress said. “I look back now and I’m like, ‘What?’ You look at Taylor Swift, I mean how old is she? She’s 26. I had two kids by the time I was 27 and I’d been married for four years. But that’s what I wanted.”
Nicole Kidman in October 2018
In a New York Magazine essay at the height of the #MeToo movement, the Emmy winner confessed that “it almost feels disrespectful” to Urban to publicly discuss her first marriage. “That said, I got married very young, but it definitely wasn’t power for me — it was protection,” she wrote. “I married for love, but being married to an extremely powerful man kept me from being sexually harassed. I would work, but I was still very much cocooned. So when I came out of [the marriage] at 32, 33, it’s almost like I had to grow up.”
Nicole Kidman in October 2020
Working alongside her then-husband on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut was sometimes draining, but Kidman remembered making the best of it. “We were happily married through that,” she told The New York Times. “We would go go-kart racing after those scenes. We’d rent out a place and go racing at three in the morning. I don’t know what else to say. Maybe I don’t have the ability to look back and dissect it. Or I’m not willing to.”
Nicole Kidman in September 2021
When discussing how much attention her former relationship received in its heyday — and continued to receive post-split — Kidman told Harper’s Bazaar that she had no regrets. “I was young. I think I offered it up?” she said. “Maybe I’ve gotten a bit more trepidatious, but I’m always trying to be as open as possible. I just prefer to live in the world that way.”
Nicole Kidman in December 2021
After the debut of Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos, in which Kidman portrays the late Lucille Ball alongside Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz, the Australian said she found the couple’s ups and downs to be “very relatable.” She told The Guardian, “It’s about a creative and romantic relationship that doesn’t work out. But from it come some extraordinary things. And I love that. I love that it’s not a happy ending. … You can’t make people behave how you want them to, and sometimes you’re going to fall in love with someone who isn’t going to be the person you spend the rest of your life with.”
When asked whether she was referring to Cruise, Kidman replied, “Oh, my God, no, no. Absolutely not. No. I mean, that’s, honestly, so long ago that that isn’t in this equation. So, no.”
Tom Cruise in May 2025
While looking back on Eyes Wide Shut, Cruise spoke about Kidman publicly for the first time in decades.
“I suggested Nicole play the role,” Cruise the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine. “Because obviously she’s a great actress.”
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