She was warned. She didn't care. And three decades on, Nicole Kidman says she'd do it all over again — career consequences be damned.

In a candid new cover interview with British Vogue, the Oscar-winning actress reflects on the two great loves of her life, two very public divorces, and why, even now, the future feels like an open question she isn't quite ready to answer.

'Of course I'll throw my career away'

Kidman was 23 when she married Tom Cruise in 1990, having met him a year earlier on the set of Days of Thunder. Hollywood insiders wasted little time delivering their verdict: being the wife of one of the planet's biggest movie stars would swallow her whole.

A dark-haired man in a dark purple blazer over a white shirt smiles broadly at the camera while a curly blonde-haired woman in a black short-sleeve top stands behind him with her arms around his shoulders, outdoors on a street with buildings and vehicles in the background.
Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman pictured together at a public event during their marriage, which lasted from 1990 to 2001. The former Hollywood power couple co-starred in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and remain one of the most iconic celebrity pairings of the era.

She wasn't having it.

'I remember people saying to me, "OK, well this is really going to affect your career." I'm like, "I don't care. I'm in love. I want to be married." And then I was his wife and they were like, "See, we told you." I'm like, "So what? I wasn't meant to marry the man I love? Of course I'll throw my career away. I don't care."'

It's a sentiment that feels almost radical coming from someone at the peak of Hollywood's food chain. And yet history tells its own story: while Kidman was busy being a devoted spouse, her film career quietly exploded around her. The years of her marriage to Cruise brought To Die For, The Portrait of a Lady and Eyes Wide Shut — the latter of which Cruise himself reportedly suggested she join, pitching her to director Stanley Kubrick as the only woman for the role of Alice Harford. After their separation in 2001, came Moulin Rouge!, The Others, and the Oscar-winning turn in The Hours.

The people who warned her, it turns out, were spectacularly wrong.

A different kind of heartbreak

If the end of her marriage to Cruise was painful, the more recent split from country musician Keith Urban — whom Kidman married in 2006 — appears to have cut differently. Kidman filed for divorce in September 2025, citing marital difficulties and irreconcilable differences, with the separation finalised out of court by January.

For a woman who has navigated tabloid scrutiny since her early twenties, the experience still managed to catch her off guard.

'There was a point where I was very fearful and deeply vulnerable, which is exposing. And then at the same time going, "Well, I can either really not confront it and just curl up, or I can just go forward with an enormous amount of hope."'

Asked whether her first divorce had at least prepared her for the media circus surrounding the second, Kidman gave a response that was equal parts honest and wry: 'It's all new. Every time!'

A tattooed man with medium-length streaked hair wearing an open black velvet blazer stands beside a woman with long blonde hair wearing a sleeveless black leather top and black skirt, both posing in front of a red and teal event backdrop.
Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman made a stylish appearance together at the Academy of Country Music Awards, where Urban was recognized among country music's elite. The couple, married in 2006

The 59-year-old isn't pretending to have it all figured out. 'You make all these plans and you have all these ideas of what it's all going to be like and then it's… not,' she told Vogue. 'You have to adjust. You adapt. The future, it's completely unknown to me right now.'

Dancing in disguise

There is, at least, one reliable escape. Kidman revealed in the interview that when the pressure of public life gets too much, she slips on a pair of glasses, pulls on a dark wig, and heads out dancing. 'As long as I'm surrounded by people — like, I take people with me — then I'm fine,' she said. 'I need it.'

It's a quietly joyful image: one of the most recognisable women on the planet, incognito on a dancefloor somewhere, carving out a pocket of ordinary life amid the extraordinary.

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