‘Shockwaves through the industry’: Why Nicole Kidman’s second marriage breakdown is so heartbreaking for fans
News of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban’s split has rocked the world. It’s the second time her longtime fans have been left devastated by a marriage breakdown.
Australia swooned in 2006 when the nation’s cinematic sweetheart Nicole Kidman finally got the wedding – big, Catholic and Sydney-based – she deserved at Manly’s St Patrick’s College to homegrown country music star Keith Urban.
Paparazzi from around the world descended on the Cardinal Cerretti Chapel to capture the moment and to see Kidman’s reclusive children with Scientologist ex-husband Tom Cruise, Isabella and Connor, play a role in the wedding party.
Five years earlier, Kidman’s first marriage to Cruise, her Days of Thunder and Eyes Wide Shut co-star had broken down in a frenzy of sensational rumours about the role Church of Scientology chairman David Miscavige may have played in the eventual breakdown, Kidman’s fertility and the supposed remnants of a failed pregnancy in a deep freezer.
For the Aussie star’s longtime fans, news of her second high-profile Hollywood split is a dagger to the heart.
Nicole and Tom’s marriage breakdown
The breakdown of Kidman’s first marriage to Cruise sent shockwaves through the industry in 2001.
Kidman has said she was blindsided when Cruise informed her on the eve of their 10th wedding anniversary that he was calling the marriage off.
He would file for divorce citing irreconcilable differences and later say that “Nicole has always known exactly why the parties are divorcing.”
There were reports the marriage floundered three years earlier during the exhaustive production of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, a film which took more than 400 days to shoot and, due to Kubrick’s perfectionism, was almost three years in production before finally being released in 1999.
While the court would award the couple joint custody of their children, Kidman would soon see less and less of Isabella and Connor spurring more questions about the influence and hold of Cruise’s church on the children.
MORE: Inside Nicole, Keith’s $25m property portfolio
She later revealed she’d suffered a miscarriage at the end of her marriage to Cruise.
The whole country, or so it seemed, had been praying Kidman would make a better match second-time around and when she fell in love with Queensland-bred Urban after meeting him at a G’Day USA reception in Los Angeles in 2005 it appeared she had.
On the surface they were a perfect match.
Nicole and Keith’s love story
Both were committed to their separate careers in the US while happy to build a property empire at home in Australia, one to which they frequently returned to visit family.
They were also eager to start a family of their own and would welcome daughters Sunday Rose, now 17, and Faith Margaret, now 14.
MORE: Nicole’s $132k-a-month UK rental without Keith
Urban would admit he found love with Kidman at a difficult time in his life.
“I wasn’t in a very healthy place in my life. I’d never have thought she’d see anything in a guy like me,” he once said, explaining why it had taken him so long to call Kidman after their first meeting.
Four months into their marriage Kidman would stage an intervention for Urban.
After two failed attempts to kick cocaine he entered rehab at the Betty Ford Clinic.
“I was very very blessed to have Nic call an intervention on me. I had a tight group of friends around me for the intervention,” he would tell Rolling Stone.
He admitted it was a “miracle” the couple’s marriage survived the rehab but claimed he emerged from the period “spiritually woken”.
“I use the expression ‘I was born into her’ … and that’s how I feel,” Urban said.
Kidman, for her part, would later say she had married “a really good man”.
The separation comes after a decade of hard personal losses for Kidman.
In 2014 her beloved father Anthony died while travelling in Singapore where Kidman’s younger sister Antonia was living.
Then in September 2024 she lost her mother, Janelle, following a long illness.
Urban reportedly moved out of the family home in Nashville at the start of the US summer.
He kicked off his High and Alive world tour in the US on May 22. The tour winds up in October.
