Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman has offered fresh insight into her decade-long union with Tom Cruise, recalling how she dismissed career warnings to marry the superstar at 23 and found herself shaped by a level of fame few experience so young.
Speaking in her new British Vogue cover interview, the 59-year-old reflected on a relationship that began when the pair met on the set of “Days of Thunder” in 1989 — a film that served as Kidman’s first major Hollywood role under director Tony Scott. The two married on Christmas Eve 1990. Cruise initiated divorce proceedings in February 2001, citing irreconcilable differences, and the dissolution was completed in August 2001.
Kidman shares two daughters with musician Keith Urban, whom she wed in 2006: Sunday Rose, currently 18, and Faith Margaret, currently 15. That 19-year partnership concluded in 2025, a transition she also discussed in the magazine piece as a time of reckoning and emotional openness amid uncertainty.
Ignoring the Doubters
Those close to Kidman reacted with alarm when she became romantically involved with Cruise, repeatedly cautioning her that tying herself to such a massive star would derail her professional trajectory. Her reply, she recalled, was that she simply didn’t care — she had fallen madly in love and found the entire arrangement completely natural, despite suddenly being 22 or 23 years old with one of cinema’s most recognizable figures as her husband.
She credits that early immersion in extreme visibility with giving her the composure she now displays at premieres, fashion weeks, and other high-octane public occasions. Living at the center of global attention from such a formative stage, she explained, became her baseline experience.
An Uninterrupted Ascent
The predictions of professional ruin never materialized. Throughout the 1990s, while tabloids chronicled every detail of the couple’s life together, Kidman assembled an increasingly impressive résumé that included “To Die For,” “The Portrait of a Lady,” and “Practical Magic” — performances that showcased dramatic depth no amount of paparazzi coverage could diminish.
She and Cruise collaborated onscreen twice. The first, Ron Howard’s 1992 feature “Far and Away,” drew a mixed reception. The second was Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” in 1999, the legendary director’s final work, in which Kidman portrayed Alice Harford opposite Cruise’s Bill Harford. In a recent conversation with Sight & Sound magazine, Cruise disclosed that he had personally championed Kidman to Kubrick, calling her a great actress and advocating for her casting.
Far from derailing her career, the end of the marriage in 2001 coincided with a creative peak: “Moulin Rouge!” and “The Others” both arrived that year, and her Oscar-winning turn in “The Hours” followed in 2002, solidifying her status among Hollywood’s top-tier performers.
Coming of Age Under Scrutiny
In a 2013 Vanity Fair interview, Kidman acknowledged plainly that she had been a child when the marriage began and needed to grow up. The new British Vogue profile revisits that territory with added detail, as she observed that so much of her adulthood has unfolded in the public eye that she struggles to recall what came before.
During the marriage, Kidman and Cruise adopted two children: Bella, now 33, and Connor, now 31.
A Life of Contrasts
The British Vogue conversation reveals a woman at ease with contradiction. Kidman recounted spending part of this summer moving between London, Ibiza, Paris, and Portofino, and described evenings that might begin with Scrabble and end at a nightclub, sometimes wearing a dark wig to navigate crowds unrecognized. She emerges as someone both globally recognizable and instinctively guarded, intellectually disciplined yet guided fundamentally by emotion.
The September 2026 edition of British Vogue becomes available on newsstands August 20.
