5 Hard Lessons Nicole Kidman Taught Us About Love

Both onscreen and offscreen, Nicole Kidman is a woman of great love. Whether she's starring in the consuming star-crossed passion of "Moulin Rouge" or getting onstage to sing with former-husband Keith Urban, the actor is all about giving herself over to the power of deep emotion. "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,'" she told Vanity Fair in 2002. "I want to feel alive — I want to reel, basically."

Perhaps it's that willingness to throw herself into love that has resulted in the star's two passionate marriages, as well as her greatest heartbreaks. Urban once told People, "She's all heart!" Kidman was involved with actor Tom Cruise for nearly 12 years, and later was married to Urban for more than 19 years. Neither relationship was perfect, and Kidman's marriage to Urban had its share of glaring red flags. Still, throughout it all, Kidman, who describes herself as 'deeply romantic,' demonstrated the inspiring strength it takes to find love, to survive it, and then to find it again.

For Nicole Kidman, compromise is the secret to a great relationship. The star shared that her long-time relationship with Keith Urban was founded in mutual respect, and the occasional willingness to prioritize the connection over the individual. "The greatest advice I was given was there's the individual — so there's the me and the you — and there's the we," Kidman told Vogue Australia in 2024. "It's always trial and error, and sometimes it's imbalanced and then it gets back in balance ... Because the expectation of everything being wonderful all the time — it just doesn't exist."

Kidman revealed that, during her marriage to Urban, she declined some movie roles that might have taken her too far away from her family. "I do not want to be living my life away from the person I love. I just won't do it," she told Vanity Fair in 2007. For Kidman, great love takes ongoing effort and investment; It's not always a fairy tale. But while love is sometimes difficult, the A-list star appears to take great pride in her results. "We're always working through stuff, but it's very much love based, so there's an enormous amount of give and take," she told Harper's Bazaar in 2021.

For Nicole Kidman, a recurring theme in her marriages has been her ability to love deeply and freely. She committed entirely to her relationship with Tom Cruise, and then did so again in her marriage to Keith Urban. It's this willingness to nurture her relationships that helped her develop such powerful connections. Both she and Urban were deeply committed to showing up for one another and strengthening their bond. "He flew 10 hours to come and be with me for the night, and then he flew back and did a gig," she told DuJour. "That for me is love in action. That's extraordinary. But I would do the same for him and that's what we've committed to as a couple."

It's that intensity of their commitment that Kidman credits with the couple's enduring happiness together. "Just love. Just love each other, lavish each other with love," Kidman advised in a 2016 interview with People. It's well-grounded advice, too, since it's well documented that couples who focus on emotional generosity, rather than keeping score, have stronger relationships. "The people we love are not supposed to be our enemies, but scorekeeping implies that they're down and you're up," psychologist Jennifer Vencil told Vice.

Nicole Kidman's early years in Hollywood were dominated by her marriage to Tom Cruise. "I was willing to give up everything," Kidman told Vanity Fair in 2002. "I would have walked to the end of the earth. That meant giving up a lot of things that were very important to me." As her star power grew, she worked on new, more adventurous projects and gradually began to build a reputation of her own, separate from her marriage.

As much as Kidman longed to be a wife and mother first, she couldn't deny the pull of creative work. In hindsight, she feels she would never have been able to have her A-list career if she had stayed married to Cruise. In the end, Cruise and Kidman divorced abruptly after she was done filming "Moulin Rouge."

Following the split, Kidman starred in "The Hours," a film that seemed to capture her feelings at the time. "The scene at the train station was the reason I wanted to do the film," Kidman revealed in the same Vanity Fair interview. "It is about a woman saying, 'This isn't what I want to be. I have the right to make choices for my life that are going to fulfill me.'" Famous paparazzi shots from after the divorce finalized depict Kidman, seemingly elated with relief. "Their break up was awful and ugly and it's not surprising she was happy to be free by the end," wrote one Reddit user.

Though Nicole Kidman had already been through a painful divorce from Tom Cruise, she boldly dove headfirst into a whirlwind romance with musician Keith Urban. The pair got engaged roughly just a year after meeting. To Kidman, that courage to give love another try allowed for a deep, powerful connection, though she admitted to feeling cautious after the fallout of her relationship with Cruise. "I would probably say that two very lonely people managed to meet at a time when they could open themselves to each other," she told Vanity Fair in 2007. "We were a mixture of frightened and brave."

Kidman clearly believes boldness is key to a great romance. "It was pretty intense," she told People in 2019. "I believed by that point he was the love of my life. Maybe that's because I am deeply romantic, or I'm an actress, or I have strong faith as well, but I just believed, 'Oh, okay, here he is.'" After Kidman's explosive divorce from Cruise, it took strength to be vulnerable enough. But Kidman felt it was worth the risk. "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," she told Harper's Bazaar in 2021. "My husband, Keith, says that when he met me, he said, 'How's your heart?' And I apparently responded, 'Open.'"

Nicole Kidman was just twenty-three when she got hitched to actor Tom Cruise. As a result, many of her formative years were spent in a relationship, and it deeply shaped her sense of herself. "I was so young," Kidman told Vanity Fair in 2013. "[Afterwards] 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." There's a reason that taking some time alone is among our best tips for getting back into dating after a divorce.

During the years following her divorce, Kidman's post-divorce style transformation was a glow-up for the ages. She focused on her children and her career, and won an Oscar for her performance in "The Hours." She describes those years of her life as lonely but necessary. "It highlighted to me the idea that I needed to go and have more of a real life because I had an incredible artistic life, I just didn't have the balance there," she revealed during a talk at BAFTA in 2018 [via Stylist]. Those years alone helped her to develop a strong sense of self.