Nicole Kidman doesn’t miss being Mrs. Tom Cruise, said Laura Brown in Harper’s Bazaar. The 45-year-old Australian was an up-and-coming actress when she met Cruise in 1989, on the Days of Thunder set. They married the following year, and Kidman began to experience what she describes as “fame by association.” In those early years, “it was like, ‘I’m here and I’m clutching onto your arm and it all feels a little overwhelming and really strange,’” she recalls. “And I was shy. Deeply shy. I didn’t feel comfortable at all. But I felt comfortable at home.” After the couple split, in 2001, Kidman concentrated on her career, earning an Oscar for The Hours. “Having your work be the basis of fame, that’s a far more stable feeling.” She has also found stability with a fellow Australian, country singer Keith Urban, whom she married in 2006. “He just gave me confidence,” she says of her husband, “through being very kind and understanding, opening me up to trying things, my sexuality, those sorts of things.” She appreciated his “bigger, stronger personality; that’s what I’ve been drawn to. I need protection. Everyone wants to feel someone’s got their back.”
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