Since hitting a game-changing bump in the road just months into their 19-year marriage, Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban have been enjoying a big, beautiful life together.
When Keith Urban met Nicole Kidman at the G’Day LA: Australia Week gala in January 2005, he was pretty much down for the count.
Yet it took him four months to pick up the phone.
‘I’m like, ‘You didn’t love me at first sight, you didn’t notice me,’ and he’s like, ‘Yes I did but I just didn’t let on,’” Kidman recalled on Ellen in 2013, “but we kind of met and then about four months later he called me.”
A month after that, the Oscar winner was sold, as well.
“It was pretty intense,” Kidman, who was previously married to Tom Cruise, told People in 2019 of falling hard and fast for Urban. “I believed by that point he was the love of my life. Maybe that’s because I am deeply romantic, or I’m an actress, or I have strong faith as well, but I just believed, ‘Oh, okay, here he is.’”
And she had no qualms about making it official not long after that, swapping vows with Urban on June 25, 2006, at the Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel in Sydney.
“I kind of like getting married and then getting to know each other,” Kidman told Elle of her and Urban’s relatively whirlwind courtship in 2014. “I know that it sounds incredibly strange, but to me, it’s a more natural process.”
The 58-year-old later revealed that a romantic ride through Woodstock, N.Y., on the back of Urban’s motorcyle and a romantic picnic helped seal the deal.
“I was a goner—I mean, c’mon,” she told WSJ. Magazine in 2020.
At first they may have seemed an unlikely pairing, the statuesque actress and the Nashville-based country singer. But the couple have never stopped showing just how right for each other they are—be it on a red carpet or on Instagram—throughout their 19 years of marriage.
And with a seemingly year-round schedule of performances, premieres and award shows of the film, TV and music variety, there have been a lot of opportunities to snap them looking adoringly at each other.
Daughters Sunday Rose, 16, and Faith Margaret, 14, have taken to joining their parents in public on occasion, such as when the 2021 Golden Globes were a Zoom-in-from-home affair.
They also were there to support their mom at the 2024 AFI Achievement Award Gala honoring Kidman, who called the occasion “extraordinary.”
“I was driving in the car with my family going, ‘What? OK, let’s go,’” she told E! News at the April 2024 event. “But the one thing that I’ve been told over and over again is enjoy it, because moments like this are so rare. And then the great thing is I’m getting back on the plane and going back to work and doing what I do, straight after this.”
While Urban has been to more Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Met Galas than the New Zealander probably ever envisioned when he was starting out on the U.S. country circuit in the late 1990s, Kidman has also become a fixture at the CMAs, the ACMAs, the CMTs and concert venues around the world.
And yes, she does get a thrill from seeing her husband in his element.
“He’s been playing since he was 6 and because he loves playing—there’s something in that,” Kidman told CMT before the 2016 CMT Music Awards. “He doesn’t get nervous; he just can’t wait to get up there.”
During her 2013 chat with Ellen DeGeneres, when shown a pic of Urban strumming his guitar with their daughters while sitting in the back of a pickup truck, Kidman acknowledged, “He is divine, that’s very much our life. They play guitar and dance and that’s his pick-up truck.”
“The great thing about being married to a musician…you have music in the house all the time,” Kidman, the Moulin Rouge star herself a capable singer who’s been known to sing a duet or two with her husband, continued. “There is something very joyful about having music. Keith can play pretty much any instrument. He’ll just play piano at 7 in the morning that’s what we have, is breakfast around the piano and very much a part of our life.”
But life hasn’t just been all romance and family jam sessions for the couple, who appreciate what they have today even more due to what they went through early on in their relationship.
“She’s the one that I was searching for my whole life, and everything not only changed but had to change in me if I was gonna go that road,” Urban said on Dax Shepard‘s Armchair Expert podcast in 2020. “It was like the ultimate fork in the road moment in my life, and it was literally like you either get this right now or you are never, ever gonna get it right. This is your one shot.”
In October 2006, just a few months after their wedding, Urban—who had talked about his drug use in the 1990s—checked into the Betty Ford Center to treat alcohol addiction. Kidman called off the rest of her press tour for Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus to throw her full support behind him.
“I was going to lose it all,” Urban told People in November 2007, explaining his decision to go to rehab. “It was like, ‘If I don’t choose this moment to do the right thing and do something that’s going to give me life, all of the things I’m scared of losing, I’m going to lose anyway.”
“Definitely we both met each other exactly at the right time,” he said. “She said early on that she wanted to be brave with me. I feel there was something else at work, bringing us together and then just continuing to watch over us.” Urban also told the magazine that it was “very, very hard to have to have her go through that.”
Kidman, who stoically weathered a very public breakup with Cruise—with whom she shares daughter Bella Kidman Cruise, 32, and son Connor Cruise, 30—said that she and Urban jointly decided to be open about what was going on in their lives.
“You can try and hide it, smoke and mirrors and all, but then how do I visit every weekend?” she said in the October 2007 issue of Vanity Fair . “It’s been a huge lesson for me too.”
She also reflected to the publication, it being barely two years since she and Urban had first met, “I think we were two lonely people. I would probably say that two very lonely people managed to meet at a time when they could open themselves to each other. We were a mixture of frightened and brave.”
Kidman admitted that it was a “deeply painful” place that prompted Urban into recovery, but since, “I’ve learned an enormous amount having a relationship with someone who is in recovery. I’m more than willing to walk it with him. The two of us are very committed to our relationship.”
“Meeting Nic and falling in love with Nic and starting a relationship with Nic became—I realize now in hindsight—my sobriety,” he told Rolling Stone Country in 2014. “That was how I was able to keep it together.”
Urban had checked into treatment just weeks after his prophetically titled Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy Thing came out.
“I didn’t give a s–t about anything except turning a corner in my life and doing whatever it took for that. I was very, very blessed to have Nic call an intervention on me. I had a tight group of friends around me for the intervention. And off I went,” he recalled.
To call Kidman his rock is a quaint understatement—though Urban has been perfectly happy to use that term. Asked if he was scared to undergo vocal surgery in 2012, he told Rolling Stone, “For some reason, no. I thought I was in really good hands. I had Nic with me—she was such a rock. That helped hugely. She came all the way up to Boston, where I had the surgery, and she was with me the whole way.”
As he put it to CBS News in 2016, “Meeting her and getting married wasn’t life-changing, it was life-beginning. It was literally, like, ‘OK, life starts.’”
Of course, no famous couple—no matter how much they’re meant for each other—makes it all these years without running the split rumor gauntlet.
“The people who really know us are most aghast by the whole thing and going, ‘How do you not want to defend that?’ I’m like, ‘It’s pointless,’” Urban said in 2013. “Our life will be our way of defending it.”
So the question remains, how to keep that life they’ve built together chugging along?
“We just work at it. We love each other and we work at it. It’s beautiful work,” Urban has said.
Ahead of their milestone 10th anniversary, Kidman told E! News at the 2016 Tribeca Festival, “We actually said we’re going to celebrate all year.” Added Urban, “We just feel incredibly lucky.”
But perhaps even more of a pressing question, how do they still keep achieving peak aw-factor? Because work still requires them to be apart more than your average couple…or maybe not?
Kidman said early on that, once they hit seven days apart, “we start to hurt.”
Urban told Rolling Stone while Kidman was in Cannes for the premiere of Grace of Monaco—it was “excruciatingly hard,” he said at the time, to be an ocean apart—that the longest they’d gone without seeing each other was only five days and they “stay very, very connected,” Skyping and talking on the phone several times a day.
“My husband and I never text each other. We never do. Once in a blue moon, we’ll text. But mainly we say, ‘I want to hear your voice,’” Kidman dished to DuJour in 2015. Moreover, “we don’t email each other either. So it’s about trying to keep it as intimate and personal as possible.”
So that’s why when they do text, it’s… “that kind of text.”
Kidman told InStyle in 2014 that Urban also would leave her a love letter for every night he’s away.
“We never email,” Urban had previously revealed on Ellen in 2013. “Phone calls only. Which I really love…Maybe one text. Maybe one cool kind of, you know…that kind of text.” Oh, but Ellen made him say it, playing coy.
“Nice, sex texting,” he offered. “I’m a little red right now.”
But for the most part they really keep it together by being physically together, with Urban hopping on a plane one night and Kidman doing the same whenever the country—or oceans—need crossing.
Kidman told DuJour about the time Urban took a pause mid-tour in the U.S. to fly to London to see the opening night of her play Photograph 51. “I said, ‘It’s too much for you to have to fly all the way back, don’t worry,’ and he said, ‘I’m flying,’” she recalled. “He flew 10 hours to come and be with me for the night, and then he flew back and did a gig. That for me is love in action. That’s extraordinary. But I would do the same for him and that’s what we’ve committed to as a couple.”
Of course, they aren’t always racking up airline miles. They amass fuel points, too.
“That’s basically how I’ve seen most of America, on that [tour] bus,” she also told InStyle. “Keith and I are both gypsies at heart. We can make our home wherever we are. The girls are like that too now, so we take them everywhere” (and sometimes give them big little roles to play).
In the end, “I’m very country at heart,” Kidman has also said. “I have a real desire to be outdoors, a desire for simplicity—a slightly slower, relaxed approach to life. A community, not a big-city feel. That’s what I grew up with, and it’s what I prefer.”
So it’s obvious by now that these two kindred spirits never really were an odd match, though from Urban’s perspective they’re still a case of Earth crossing paths with Venus.
“I have a wife who is just from another planet,” Urban said. “She is so celestial. I say that I was born into her. That is the best way I can describe how I feel about her and us.”
See more of Kidman and Urban’s endlessly sweet moments:
18th Anniversary in 2024
Keith Urban shared this photo of himself serenading Nicole Kidman in an Instagram tribute honoring their 18th wedding anniversary.
2024 AFI Life Achievement Award Gala
It was a family affair for the couple, who were joined by their daughters Sunday Rose (in the floral dress) and Faith Margaret (in the orange gown) at the red carpet event.
Also along for the ride? Nicole’s niece Sybella Hawley, sister Antonia Kidman and brother-in-law Craig Marran.
Keith shared this selfie on the couple’s 16th anniversary.
The actress lovingly touched her husband’s face on the red carpet.
Keith sweetly held Nicole’s hand at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards, where she was nominated in the Best Actress in a TV Series (Drama) category for her work in Big Little Lies.
This cute moment between the couple was captured at the 2019 ACM Awards.
The actress cuddled up to her husband during the semi-finals match at the Australian Open.
The fan-favorite couple embraced after Keith’s win at the 2018 CMA Awards.
Nicole and Keith embraced onstage during Lincoln Center’s American Songbook Gala.
#Selfie! The country singer and actress posed for a picture at the CMA Awards.
In this 2017 Emmy Awards pic, it was Keith’s turn to look down as Nicole leaned in.
The duo was back to staring into each other’s eyes, but Nicole made this pic even more sweet by placing her hands on Keith’s face.
The two looked infatuated with each other on the red carpet at the premiere of The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
Keith and Nicole shared a sweet moment at the country music gathering.
The A-list couple shared an intimate kiss in this adorable Facebook picture.
In this pic, the couple gave a variation of their signature pose. Instead of staring into each other’s eyes, Nicole looked down as Keith leaned in to whisper in her ear.
This candid pic proves that the couple does this pose IRL and not just on the red carpet.
The couple strike their signature pose—leaning in and staring into each other’s eyes.
The Hollywood couple share a tender moment in front of the cameras.
Keith and Nicole only had eyes for each other at the film event.
(Originally published June 25, 2016, at 3 a.m. PT)
Source: www.eonline.com