Nicole Kidman Opens Up About Marriage to Tom Cruise: ‘I Was So Young’

Nicole Kidman says certain aspects of her marriage to Tom Cruise were “intoxicating” but admits she has found her “great love” in now-husband Keith Urban.

The actress, now 46, married Cruise when she was only 23. The couple split in 2001 after 10 years of marriage, and she went on to wed Urban in 2006.

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“I was so young,” Kidman tells Vanity Fair in its December issue of her marriage to Cruise. “And you know, with no disrespect to what I had with Tom, I’ve met my great love now. And I really did not know if that was going to happen. I wanted it, but I didn’t want it for a while, because I didn’t want to jump from one relationship to another. I had a lot of time alone, which was really, really good, because I was a child, really, when I got married. And I needed to grow up.”

Still, she says, she hit a low point while going through her divorce from Cruise. While coping with the split, she was filming The Hours, in which she portrayed Virginia Woolf, a role that earned her an Oscar for best actress. She said she got a wake-up call while filming the scene in which she was called upon to re-create the author’s suicide.

“Walking into the river with those stones in my pockets — I chose life,” she says. “At the time, I was at a low point, and by playing her, it put me into a place of appreciating life.”

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Kidman — whose upcoming credits include The Railway Man with Colin Firth and Grace of Monaco, in which she portrays Grace Kelly — also discussed the level of fame she experienced while being married to Cruise.

“There is something about that sort of existence that, if you really focus on each other and you’re in that bubble, it’s very intoxicating, because it’s just the two of you,” she says. “And there is only one other person that’s going through it. So it brings you very close, and it’s deeply romantic. I’m sure Brad and Angelina have that — because there’s nobody else that understands it except that person who’s sleeping right next to you.”