Nicole Kidman admits she was warned about marrying Tom Cruise as she opens up about marriage
Nicole Kidman has said she was warned about marrying Tom Cruise but ‘didn’t care’ because she was in love.
The Aussie star was just 23 when she met Cruise, then 28, while filming Days of Thunder in 1989.
After hitting it off, the pair tied the knot on Christmas eve the following year and went on to adopt two children, Bella and Connor, together.
The marriage lasted for 11 years before they officially announced their separation in February 2001 and were divorced later that same year.
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In a new interview with Vogue, Kidman, now 59, has opened up about the early days of their relationship and claims she was warned off marrying him as it could harm her career.
When the pair met, Kidman was making her Hollywood debut, while Cruise already had an impressive career behind him with roles in Top Gun, Risky Business, and Rain Man.
However, Kidman said she didn’t listen to the warnings as the couple were madly in love and wanted to get hitched.
She said: “I got married so young. Suddenly I was 22, 23 years old and I had this huge movie star husband. But it just seemed completely natural. We just fell madly in love and it was that simple.
“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.’”
Of course, we now know that the marriage didn’t ‘throw away’ Kidman’s career.
In fact, she’s one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and one of the highest paid actresses in the world, with credits in Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut, Practical Magic, Batman Forever, and The Hours, to name but a few.
She’s also earned herself an Oscar, a BAFTA, six Golden Globes, and a couple of Primetime Emmy Awards.
Kidman says her marriage, and the intense media scrutiny that followed, has helped her cope with fame.
Speaking to Vogue about life in the public eye, she said: “Strangely enough, I feel comfortable. Is that weird? That’s so weird.
“But you have to remember literally, because of who I married at such a young age, I was thrust into it since I was 22… [My life has been] more time like that than not. My memory of it not being that is quite blurry, because I was really young.”
Kidman has previously said one of the main reasons her marriage to Cruise didn’t work out was because of her age.
“I was a child, really, when I got married. And I needed to grow up,” she told Vanity Fair in 2013.
Following their split, Kidman married country singer Keith Urban and had two daughters together.
They split up in 2025 with their divorce finalising earlier this year.
As for Cruise, he had a very-high profile marriage to Katie Holmes from 2006 to 2012.
Topics: Celebrity, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman
Claire Reid