What price success? Nicole Kidman's 2003 Oscar win should have been one of the happiest moments of her life. But it sounds like the victory was a hollow one for the Hours actress. Gracing the cover of Harper's Bazaar Australia's December issue, the 46-year-old movie star reveals that she found it difficult to revel in her professional accomplishments after the demise of her 11-year marriage to Tom Cruise.
Winning an Oscar "can show you the emptiness of your own life, which is kind of what it showed me," Page Six quotes the Australia native as telling the mag of her Best Actress win two years after her divorce from Cruise and three years before her wedding to second husband Keith Urban. "I was having professional success and my personal life was struggling."
The Grace of Monaco star and the Jack Reacher actor, 51 — who have two adopted kids together, Bella and Connor — split in 2001, 12 years after meeting on the set of Days of Thunder. Their breakup shattered Kidman; she previously told Vanity Fair that she was at such a loss after their divorce that she found herself relating to suicidal author Virginia Woolf, whom she played in The Hours.
"Walking into the river with those stones in my pockets — I chose life," she told the mag of filming one particular scene. "At the time, I was at a low point, and by playing her, it put me into a place of appreciating life."
That sense of gratitude has carried over into her marriage to country singer Urban, with whom she has two young daughters, Sunday and Faith. And it's at least partly because of their quiet life in Tennessee that the Paperboy actress is now content to take on smaller, less flashy roles.
"I'm not carrying the whole film, and it's not six to seven months' work like Moulin Rouge!" she reportedly says in her interview with Harper's Bazaar Australia. "I get to come for three weeks and then go home."
