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Nicole Kidman Details How Tom Cruise Marriage Affected Her Career

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Nicole Kidman was far and away from a career mindset when it came to falling in love with Tom Cruise.

Almost exactly 25 years after the former couple divorced, the Moulin Rouge! actress admitted that her 10-year marriage to the Top Gun actor could’ve changed the trajectory of her life—and she didn’t care.

“I got married so young,” Kidman told British Vogue in an interview published Aug. 13. “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.”

Kidman—mom to Bella, 33, and Connor, 31, with Cruise, as well as Sunday Rose, 18, and Faith Margaret, 15, with ex Keith Ubran—emphasized that she didn’t mind being Mrs. Cruise.

“I remember people saying to me, ‘OK, well this is really going to affect your career,’” Kidman recalled. “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.’”

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Of course, the Oscar winner did not in any sense throw her career away—and she’s earned a reputation for staying booked and busy.

“I just think there are some people who are wired to work,” Kidman detailed. “I just am.”

And the Practical Magic star acknowledged that she did learn how to roll with fame seamlessly through her marriage to Cruise.

“Strangely enough, I feel comfortable. Is that weird? That’s so weird,” she joked of her relationship to fame. “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.”

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Meanwhile, Kidman has previously admitted that the pinnacle of her career came after her marriage to Cruise ended—when she took home an Oscar in 2003 for her performance as Virginia Woolf in The Hours.

“There was Moulin Rouge, The Hours, The Others, and it all sort of came in the same time period,” Kidman told E! News in March. “It was overwhelming at the time, but it was incredibly exciting as well.”

Kidman isn’t the only star Cruise has had a high-profile romance with. Keep reading for a look back at his relationship history…

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Melissa GilbertTom Cruise‘s career took off almost as fast as his love life when he got to Hollywood.Little House on the Prairie star and future SAG president Melissa Gilbert met Cruise when “he was a struggling starving actor, and I was working. I actually bought him his first set of dishes.”She told Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live! in 2014 that they did not have sex (she was “16, maybe, or 17” at the time), but “we made out”—and he was a good kisser.

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Heather LocklearHeather Locklear scored her breakout role in Dynasty right around the time Cruise made his big-screen debut in the 1981 film Taps—and naturally, the fresh-faced stars went on a date in the early ’80s after meeting at an audition.Locklear, a Los Angeles native, later described the date to Chelsea Handler as more of a favor she did for the new guy in town. The kid didn’t lack for confidence, though. “You know in Risky Business where he does that dance in his underwear, and he does the splits?” the Melrose Place alum recalled. “We were dancing at a club and he went into that, he started doing the splits.” She feigned looking startled. “You just kinda stand there and don’t know what to do. Do you dance around him? So I was like, ‘I’ll just sit down and you can [do you thing].'”

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Rebecca De MornayMore impressed by his moves was his Risky Business costar Rebecca De Mornay, whom he started dating after the R-rated romance hit theaters in August 1983.”There’s something earnest and virtuous about him that’s quite rare,” she told Rolling Stone in 1986. “There’s definitely something different about kids who come from broken homes. They have this sort of searching quality, because you’re searching for love and affection, if you’ve been robbed of a substantial amount of time with your parents. I think that’s true of Tom.”They stayed together while he was in London filming the action fantasy Legend, but broke up after he returned to the U.S. to shoot Top Gun. “Relationships are hard,” Cruise told Rolling Stone in 1986. “You have to know when you’re going to be in a different place from someone else, you have to have the strength to separate. People are more prone to stay together for the security, which is something in my life that I have really not done, in relationships or even in business. If something’s not working, you’ve got to face it and move on.”Asked about settling down, he said, “I don’t know if I could get married. Right now, in my present state of mind, I don’t believe so. I need a lot of space for myself and my work. You can’t say, ‘Okay, let’s keep that thought—I’ll be back to you in a couple of months when I finish this.’ But I do enjoy being in a relationship.”

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CherCruise and Cher would’ve been a hard couple to miss, such as when they ran into each other in 2002 at the 1st Annual Entertainment Industry Foundation “Love Rocks” Concert.But it wasn’t until around 2008 that the entertainment icon opened up about her mid-’80s fling with Cruise, who’s 17 years her junior.”I was crazy about him,” Cher told Oprah Winfrey. Reminiscent of what De Mornay said about him being an innocent, the singer recalled, “He was shy. He said he felt like such a boob in school and nobody talked to him. We went on a date once for dinner in a New York restaurant and the waitress was from his old school. He told me she never talked to him back in school, but now he was recognized he got all her attention. It could have been a great big romance because I was crazy for him.”On Watch What Happens Live! in 2013, Cher said Cruise definitely made her “top five” list of lovers in life. “It was a long, long time ago and neither one of us ever talked about it and I don’t know why,” she told Andy Cohen. “When we were together he was such a private person. He always has been until lately. He didn’t mention it and I didn’t mention it. I loved him though, he was amazing.”

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Mimi RogersCruise met Mimi Rogers in 1985 at a dinner party when she was dating a friend of his. They quietly tied the knot on May 9, 1987, in upstate New York. Emilio Estevez was Cruise’s best man. His mother, Mary Lee South, told People her new daughter-in-law was “top notch.”The Gung Ho actress was previously married to Scientology counselor Jim Rogers, and is said to have introduced Cruise to the religion. “She took him under her wing,” Cruise biographer Wensley Clarkson told Entertainment Weekly in 2000. (Rogers has since left the church.)The actors announced they were divorcing in January 1990. “Is that the story, that I was bored with that child and threw him over, chewed him up and spat him out?” Rogers fired back at Playboy in 1993 when asked why her marriage to Cruise didn’t work out. “Well, here’s the real story. Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk. At least for that period of time, it looked as though marriage wouldn’t fit into his overall spiritual need. And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument.” She added, “My instrument needed tuning.”Rogers, six years older than Cruise, told the Telegraph in 2001, “The stardom wasn’t really a problem. What did annoy me, though, was the age thing. Some of the tabloids brought it up all the time, and exaggerated the gap between Tom and me. Every six months they seemed to add a year to my age. If Tom and I were still married, the tabloids would probably have me in my sixties by now.”

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Nicole KidmanNicole Kidman met Cruise during casting of the 1990 racing drama Days of Thunder. After his divorce from Rogers was finalized, Cruise proposed and they tied the knot on Christmas Eve in 1990.They adopted daughter Isabella at birth on Dec. 22, 1992, as they did with son Connor, born Jan. 17, 1995.They also starred in two more films together, the 1992 period epic Far and Away and the 1999 erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut, which they later admitted was an extremely intense (and long) shoot, made all the more devastating by director Stanley Kubrick‘s death days after he screened his final cut.”Our marriage is stronger because of it,” Cruise said of their 400-day odyssey with Kubrick. “And our friendship is deeper.” Kidman told Talk in 2000,”All I can say is that I hope we are together when we are 80. I can’t say we will be, but I will be so devastated if we are not.”

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Nicole KidmanInstead, Cruise filed for divorce months later.”Citing the difficulties inherent in diverging careers which constantly kept them apart, they concluded that an amicable separation seemed best for both of them at this time,” their longtime rep said on Feb. 5, 2001, announcing the split.Asked why his second marriage ended, Cruise told Vanity Fair in October 2001, “She knows why, and I know why. She’s the mother of my children, and I wish her well. And I think that you just move on. And I don’t say that lightly. I don’t say that with anything. 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.”Toward the end of 2002, Kidman told VF, “I’m starting to understand now [why we broke up]. At the time I didn’t.”When they met, she told the magazine, “He basically swept me off my feet. I fell madly, passionately in love. And as happens when you fall in love, my whole plan in terms of what I wanted for my life—I was like, ‘Forget it. This is it.’ I was consumed by it, willingly. And I was desperate to have a baby with him. I didn’t care if we were married. That’s what I wish I’d done.”

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Penélope CruzAfter meeting on the set of 2001’s trippy Vanilla Sky, Penélope Cruz dated Cruise for three years.They made their debut as a couple at the August 2001 premiere of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. “He came and shared it with me,” Cruz said on Good Morning America. “It was special for me that he wanted to share it with me that way.””I’m very, very happy with my relationship,” Cruise told People in the summer of 2003, also denying he was engaged to the Spanish actress. The relationship wasn’t without its legal drama, however, as Cruz ended up securing damages and a retraction from an Australian tabloid in June 2003 over a story claiming her impending marriage to Cruise was postponed because she had an affair. They split up in January 2004 and alerted the world two months later, a source telling People at the time, “The relationship just ran its course and they decided not to be girlfriend and boyfriend anymore,” Cruise was married when they shot Vanilla Sky, but Cruz said they didn’t get together until later, noting on GMA, “There’s nothing to hide and it’s a good thing.”As she told the Telegraph2008, “I’ve never fallen in love with someone I’m working with. It’s always been afterwards. If something becomes friendship, then maybe months later it becomes something else, but you can never know. It’s always a mystery. You can’t plan those things.”Cruz married occasional costar Javier Bardem in 2010.

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Sofía VergaraSofía Vergara was name-checked in a 2012 Vanity Fair story (the particulars of which were denied by the Church of Scientology, while an attorney for Cruise called the story “sleazy”) that alleged she was among “a number of beautiful, well-known actresses” whom Cruise fancied but couldn’t personally turn on to Scientology.When a Daily Beast interviewer noted to Vergara in 2011 that he hadn’t heard too much about what it was like to date Cruise, the Modern Family actress reportedly laughed hysterically and exclaimed, “Let’s keep it that way! I don’t want to talk about that!”

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Scarlett JohanssonScarlett Johansson, who looked perfectly cordial with Cruise in February 2005 at an Ambassadors for Humanity gala honoring Bill Clinton and benefiting the Shoah Foundation, was mentioned alongside Vergara in the VF story as one of the “beautiful, well-known actresses.” (Again, the church denied any such matchmaking occurred.)“The very idea of any person auditioning to be in a relationship is so demeaning,” Johansson said in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter in 2018 when her name came up again in that context on Megyn Kelly TODAY. “I refuse for anyone to spread the idea that I lack the integrity to choose my own relationships.”

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Nazanin BoniadiAccording to the 2012 Vanity Fair article, Iranian actress Nazanin Boniadi quietly dated Cruise between November 2004 and January 2005 before the actor and the church decided she wasn’t right for him.For their first date, per VF, Cruise arranged for a private tour of the Empire State Building, followed by dinner at Nobu and ice skating at Rockefeller Center, which was closed to the public for the occasion.Boniadi was a Scientologist when she was allegedly recruited to date Cruise, but later left the church. (The church called the alleged mission to hook Boniadi and Cruise up a “phantom project that never existed.”)”Their story is essentially a rehash of tired old lies previously run in the supermarket tabloids, quoting the same bogus ‘sources,'” longtime Cruise attorney Bert Fields, who passed away in 2022, told E! News in 2012 when the VF story came out. “It’s long, boring and false.”Asked about Cruise in 2013, Boniadi told The New York Post, “I’d rather not talk about that. It’s something that I’m not happy to… Like I said, I have so many positive things happening in my life, it’s a shame not to talk about that.”

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Katie HolmesAfter a whirlwind courtship, punctuated by Cruise’s epic declaration of love for Katie Holmes on Oprah Winfrey‘s couch in May 2005, the couple welcomed daughter Suri Cruise on April 18, 2006.Annie Leibovitz shot Suri’s public debut for the October 2006 cover of Vanity Fair, and then the couple dubbed TomKat tied the knot at a castle in Italy on Nov. 18, 2006.”People are going to do what they’re going to do,” Cruise told MTV News in June 2005, talking about the mixed reaction to his unbridled enthusiasm. “Here’s the thing, you can’t think about it in terms of what people are going to do or say. It’s ‘I want to share my life with this woman. This woman is exceptional, she’s special, she’s extraordinary and I have great respect for her.’ It’s someone who’s saying ‘I’ve got nothing to hide, I’m happy.’ I’m happy, man!”Asked about the possibility of acting with Holmes one day, he added, “I’d love to work with her, she’s a great actress. I will work with her someday, no question.”

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Katie HolmesHolmes filed for divorce in June 2012 and, with a prenup drafted by her attorney father Martin Holmes in hand, all was settled within two weeks. While Cruise enjoyed some public outings with Suri to places like Disney World, the child lived primarily with Holmes, mother and daughter eventually relocating from Los Angeles to New York.”I don’t want that moment in my life to define me, to be who I am,” Holmes told People in October 2014, referring to her marriage to Cruise. “I don’t want that to be what I’m known as. I was an actor before, an actor during and an actor now.”

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Cameron DiazHot on the heels of his divorce from Holmes, Cruise was rumored to be dating Cameron Diaz, a few years after they made 2010’s Knight and Day.The rumor wasn’t true, but the pair—who were also in Vanilla Sky together—did get along swimmingly on the set of the comedic action thriller.Asked how she spent her 40th birthday in August 2012, Diaz recalled on The Graham Norton Show, “I happened to bump into Penélope Cruz, Javier [Bardem], Tom and his son in a hotel and joined them for dinner. At midnight I said, ‘I’m 40!’ so we took pictures and then said, ‘Goodnight, see you later, blah, blah, blah,’ and I haven’t seen him since.””But the next thing I know,” she added, “apparently I am dating him and it’s full on and he is coming after me!”

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Laura PreponA rumor caught fire in 2014 that Cruise was dating Laura Prepon, and their new romance was all anyone on the set of Orange Is the New Black could talk about. That turned out to be untrue, with reps on both sides vehemently denying it.”It’s just so funny that, when people don’t know, they just make stuff up, [like] apparently I’m dating Tom Cruise right now,” Prepon told She Knows. “And apparently he doesn’t want me doing [OITNB] because I portray a lesbian and I’m a Scientologist.”She added, “This is false. Where are they even getting this stuff? It’s unbelievable to me.”

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Vanessa KirbyIn 2017, Cruise was reportedly smitten with Vanessa Kirby after watching her performance as Princess Margaret in The Crown.The British actress didn’t entirely help matters when she told the Times of London that she was seeing somebody under the radar, but such was her business to say so. (It turned out to be Callum Turner, her boyfriend through 2019.)Meanwhile, E! News heard there was no truth to this rumor, either, and Kirby’s compelling screen presence spoke for itself when she debuted as the cunning White Widow in 2018’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout.

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Hayley AtwellMarvel star Hayley Atwell also got the Kirby treatment while filming her M:I – Dead Reckoning part as crafty thief Grace (and she’s in 2025’s The Final Reckoning).But while rumors swirled about a possible romance between the English actress and Cruise, she turned to none other than Cruise for advice on how to deal with the intrusiveness of it all.”I would be like, ‘Ooh, there’s some weird rumors, and it feels base, it feels a little dirty, it feels grubby, it’s not what I’m about,'” Atwell told The Independent in 2023 (the same year she married husband Ned Wolfgang Kelly). “Why are things being assumed or projected onto me about my relationship with my work colleague and boss?” When she brought it up to Cruise, she noted, “He’d be like ‘You know exactly who you are. You know what you’re about. And that is the only thing that matters. It doesn’t matter what people think of you, if you are in integrity with yourself, if you know what your value system is.'”

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Ana de ArmasHanging out on the days before Valentine’s Day and a woman’s birthday isn’t the best way to not spark romance rumors. Ana de Armas said on Good Morning America in May 2025 that she was having “so much fun” discussing future projects with Cruise.As for the actor, he was keeping up with the Cuban actress’ filmography, telling TikToker Javier Ibarreche at the London premiere of M:I – The Final Reckoning that he had seen her John Wick spin-off film Ballerina, and “it just kicks ass!”But while they are planning to costar in the Doug Liman-directed Deeper whenever that deep-sea adventure gets off the ground, they were also spotted holding hands in public in July 2025.

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