Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's shocking split has left fans of the couple reeling, with the Babygirl actress filing for divorce on September 30 after 19 years of marriage. The pair, who share daughters Sunday, 17, and Faith, 14, first met in 2005 at the G'Day USA Gala in Los Angeles, four years after Nicole had divorced her first husband, Mission Impossible star Tom Cruise. She was married to the Hollywood superstar for 10 years before they called it quits, and her comment on their split back in 2001 is now going viral following her divorce from Keith.
The star visited The Late Show with David Letterman in August of that year to promote The Others, six months after Nicole and Tom jointly announced they were parting ways. David dived straight in, asking her, "I heard you're getting divorced, how's that going?" and suggested that she wouldn't be on the show if "things were not alright".
"I'd probably still be here," she replied, before admitting that she had been asked a lot of questions about the split. "Well, I can wear heels now," she coyly added, referring to Tom's five-foot-seven stature, which earned the audience's laughter. Nicole is five-foot-eleven herself, while Keith is just shy of her at five-foot-ten, prompting fans to recirculate the video in the wake of their divorce news.
Nicole and Tom first met on the set of Days of Thunder in 1990, and their whirlwind romance culminated in a December wedding that year. The duo also starred in Far and Away and Eyes Wide Shut together, and they welcomed kids Bella and Connor via adoption. The Australian star got candid about her marriage to Tom in a 2002 Vanity Fair interview, revealing that she was all-consumed by him.
Learn more about Nicole and Tom's adopted children below...
"I was willing to give up everything. I now see that as part of me. I'm willing to do that – I do it when I do a movie too," she admitted. "I'm willing to go, 'Yeah, bring it on, consume me, intoxicate me.' I want to feel alive – I want to reel, basically. I was reeling with Tom, and I loved it, and I would have walked to the end of the earth. That meant giving up a lot of things that were very important to me."
She later shared at the 2015 Women in the World summit that it took her several years to get over their breakup. "To be completely honest, I was running from my life at that time," she said. "I wasn't able to handle the reality of my life. And as an actor, you have this wonderful thing where you can go and get lost in somebody else’s life and become somebody else for a period of time."
© Barry King"I then sort of embraced my own life and I got myself together, and it took me a number of years," she added. While court documents from their divorce state that Nicole was blindsided by the breakup, Tom has always maintained that they were both aware of why things ended between them. "She knows why, and I know why. She's the mother of my children, and I wish her well," he told Vanity Fair in 2002.
© Getty Images for ACM"Things happen in life, and you do everything you can, and in every possible way, and there's a point at which you just sometimes have to face the brutal reality." Nicole and Keith have agreed not to pay each other spousal or child support, and the actress will be the children's primary residential parent.
