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:
