Nicole Kidman‘s 2003 Oscar win wasn’t memorable for the reasons one might expect.
“I was struggling with things in my personal life, yet my professional life was going so well,” she said in Dave Karger‘s upcoming 50 Oscar Nights book, excerpted by People on Monday, January 8. “That’s what happens, right?”
Kidman, now 56, won the Academy Award for Best Actress following her performance in The Hours. While she tearfully accepted the award, she felt odd after leaving the stage. She’d finalized her divorce from Tom Cruise (with whom she adopted daughter Isabella in 1992 and son Connor in 1995) after 11 years of marriage in August 2001, and she hadn’t found love again.
“I’m not a big party girl, so I was going to skip the Vanity Fair party, and everyone was like, ‘You’ve got to go. You’ve got to walk through the party carrying your Academy Award,’” she explained in Karger’s book, which will be released on Tuesday, January 23. “I said, ‘That just feels like gloating, and it doesn’t feel humble.’ Like, what? You can’t walk through carrying the award! That feels really inappropriate. They’re like, ‘That’s what you do.’”
Kidman decided to take everyone’s advice and go to the party. “So I literally walked in, carried it around, was completely overwhelmed, emotional, shaking and I didn’t enjoy it,” she recalled. “I was almost apologetic, which is so stupid. I wish I could have enjoyed it more.”
She left the party in favor of going to her room at The Beverly Hills Hotel to eat takeout. “I sat on the floor of the hotel eating French fries and a burger with my family and went to bed,” Kidman said. “That’s when it hit me. I went, ‘I need to find my love; I need a love in my life.’ Because this is supposed to be when you go, ‘This is ours.’”
It didn’t take long for her to find romance once she started dating again. Kidman got together with Lenny Kravitz later that year, and they were even briefly engaged.
Kidman found true love when she met Keith Urban in 2005. She married the country star, 56, in June 2006. They went on to welcome two kids: daughters Sunday Rose, now 15, and Faith, now 13.
Despite having long moved on, Kidman told Harper’s Bazaar in October 2021 that she doesn’t mind the public fascination with her marriage to Cruise, 61.
“I was young. I think I offered it up? 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 said. “I’m wary at times, and I’ve been hurt, but at the same time I much prefer a warm approach rather than a prickly shutdown approach. My husband, Keith, says that when he met me, he said, ‘How’s your heart?’ And I apparently responded, ‘Open.’”
