By Maddy Mussen

Copyright standard

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban are no more. The 58-year-old actress and 57-year-old country star have split after 19 years of marriage, surprising some fans — and confirming the suspicions of others.

By Hollywood standards, two decades of marriage is a lifetime, but if you were looking, perhaps the signs were there.

The couple had been reportedly living apart since the beginning of the summer, with Kidman recently decamping to London to film the Practical Magic sequel, where she was said to be paying a reported £65,000 each month to rent a mansion in Hampstead once owned by Boy George. Like showbiz ships in the night, they barely saw each other, thanks to Kidman’s back-to-back filming schedule and Urban’s years-long tour.

Urban is said to be the one who instigated the split — which “blindsided” the Babygirl actress — and the singer already has his hands on a new pad in Nashville where he’s been living. Kidman is apparently the one taking care of their two children, Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 14, since Urban departed for his High and Alive tour in May. A source said Kidman has been “holding the family together through this difficult time since Keith has been gone.”

Before Urban, Kidman was famously married to Hollywood behemoth and devout Scientologist Tom Cruise. The Nineties power couple met on the set of the 1990 film Days of Thunder and were together for 11 years. “I remember being so nervous and seeing Tom Cruise drive up in a Porsche,” she told Vanity Fair of their first interaction. “He got out of the car and walked through the door, and I was like, ‘Ah.’ My jaw dropped.

“He basically swept me off my feet. I fell madly, passionately in love. And as happens when you fall in love, my whole plan in terms of what I wanted for my life—I was like, ‘Forget it. This is it.’ I was consumed by it, willingly.”

The film was released in August, and the pair married just four months later, on Christmas Eve 1990. At the time, Kidman was 23 and Cruise was 28. During their marriage, Kidman and Cruise adopted two children: a daughter, Bella, in 1992, and a son, Connor, in 1995. Both children were adopted shortly after their birth.

In 2001, Kidman and Cruise announced their separation. Cruise filed for divorce two days later, and their marriage was dissolved later that year, with Cruise citing “irreconcilable differences”.

Looking back on their divorce years later, Kidman told Vanity Fair: “I was so young. I look back now and I’m like, ‘What?’ I had two kids by the time I was 27 and I’d been married for four years. But that’s what I wanted.”

Cruise went on to raise Bella and Connor largely without Kidman, who later explained: “They have made choices to be Scientologists. It’s our job as a parent to always offer unconditional love.” Kidman has not been seen in public with either Bella or Connor in 17 years.

Kidman’s divorce from Cruise has since become a piece of pop culture lore, endlessly referenced and quoted. One such quote comes from Kidman’s 2001 interview with David Letterman, where she commented simply: “Well, I can wear heels now.”

Then there’s the famous image of Kidman gleefully skipping down the street, taken around the same period, which is often circulated due to the belief that it was taken on the day Kidman and Cruise divorced. However, the actress denied this in a 2024 interview with GQ. “That was not me,” she said of the images. “That was from a film; that wasn’t real life.”

Four years and one quick fling with Lenny Kravitz later, Kidman met Australian-American country singer Keith Urban in 2005. The pair got chatting at a Los Angeles event that was honouring famous Australians who had moved Stateside. But the Hollywood actress initially believed Urban “wasn’t interested.” Kidman later revealed in a 2017 interview on The Ellen DeGeneres show. “I had such a crush on him,” she said, explaining that it took Urban four months to call her after their initial meeting.

“But at some point, I plucked up the courage to call those numbers and she answered, and we started talking and we talked and talked and talked and talked and it was effortless,” Urban said.

Things moved quickly. Kidman and Urban announced their engagement in May 2006. Two months later, they wed in an intimate ceremony at Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel on the grounds of St Patrick’s Estate, Manly, in Sydney. “We didn’t really know each other – we got to know each other during our marriage,” Kidman later said in an interview with Tina Brown in 2016.

During their marriage, Kidman helped Urban through various phases of alcoholism. This reportedly started early on, with an intervention held around four months after their wedding. Urban later told Rolling Stone in 2014 that he was “very, very blessed” that Kidman stepped in and pushed him to go to rehab.

“All through the years of drinking and doing drugs and all the rest of it, I always had this very specific voice inside of me that goes, ‘One day, you’re gonna come to a crossroads or a fork in the road, and it’ll be the final one,’” Urban explained in a June 2025 interview with Zane Lowe. That crossroads, he revealed, came when Nicole pushed him to go to rehab. “I knew that was it,” Urban said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, this is that fork in the road.’”

Since getting sober, Urban and Kidman appeared to have a perfectly strong relationship. They welcomed their first daughter, Sunday Rose, in 2008, and their second, Faith Margaret, in 2010.

As a couple, they regularly engage in public displays of affection and were spotted making out (tongues and all) at the 2023 Oscars and canoodling at the Met Gala that same year.

“They are just going through the motions [of being married],” a source has claimed. “If this separation gets them back together, that would be amazing, but Keith had to call her out that he isn’t happy.

“She was blindsided, but we shall see how things go during the holiday season and his upcoming birthday [next month]. They have some work to do.”

For some eagle eyed fans, there were signs. Kidman has had a packed schedule over the past few years, with back-to-back acting projects including Babygirl, The Undoing, Expats, A Family Affair, Nine Perfect Strangers, Lioness, Holland and Netflix series The Perfect Couple.

Kidman was also grieving her mother, who died in September 2024, amidst a particularly busy period of work in the lead-up to the release of Babygirl last December.

Their distance was noted in a Woman’s Day article last month, with an insider claiming: “[Kidman and Urban] do make an effort to speak every day when they’re apart, but it is shocking how much time they’ve spent apart since Nicole’s mother died last September. It’s like they both went their separate ways.’

Then, back in July, Urban dropped a hint that all was not well between him and Kidman when he hung up during a phone interview with a radio station after a crude question about Kidman filming sex scenes.

Meanwhile, Kidman told interviewers while promoting her Netflix series The Perfect Couple in September last year: “There’s no perfect anything. Anything that’s presented as perfect… forget it.”