“I was desperate to have a baby with him”: Nicole Kidman Doesn’t Blame Tom Cruise For Sidelining Her Life Goals With Their Romance

Even at 62, Tom Cruise is stealing hearts by the millions. So, Nicole Kidman can barely be blamed for falling for him when he was in his late 20s. When she met the Hollywood heavyweight on the set of Days of Thunder, it was a no-brainer. With his charming looks and magnetic aura, it was only a matter of time before the Australian actress would fall for him.

Kidman did fall and she fell hard and who was Cruise to resist the most wanted Australian beauty in Hollywood? The couple tied the knot months after the release of their film, and the ‘power couple’ tag instantly clung to them. Their romance was bound to affect Kidman’s career as it does for any other actress after marriage, but she did not hold the Mission: Impossible star responsible for it.

Nicole Kidman did not mind if her career came to a screeching halt because of her romance with Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise stepped into Hollywood in the early 1980s and by the end of that decade, he had attained superstar status with movies like Top Gun, Rain Man, and Risky Business. He was at the top of his game and unstoppable. Unsurprisingly, he had a string of romances before he settled down with Mimi Rogers in 1987.

Nicole Kidman had made a name for herself in the Australian film industry and was steadily doing the same in Hollywood when she met Cruise. The year was 1989, she was promoting her movie Dead Calm in America when she was informed that none other than Tom Cruise wanted to meet her to talk about a movie.

In an interview with Vanity Fair after their divorce, she recalled how she fell head over heels for The Mummy actor and wanted nothing more than to have a baby with him.

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.

She had not been married or been in a high-profile relationship yet, but that quickly changed after she began dating Cruise. It was a whirlwind romance, to say the least. Cruise’s divorce from Rogers was finalized earlier that year, and he got married to Kidman on Christmas Eve.

Nicole Kidman was willing to give up everything for Tom Cruise

Kidman was all in when it came to her relationship with Cruise. So much so that she did not even care about the fact that she would have to put her career on the back burner while she became the perfect wife. She told Vanity Fair:

I was willing to give up everything. [..] 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.

The couple adopted two kids, a daughter Isabella in 1993 and a son Connor in 1995. The bubble in which Kidman was living with her husband and two kids had to burst at some point. She could not have spent her entire life being just a wife.

Movies like To Die For and Portrait of a Lady changed her perception of herself. She realized that she had given up her creative freedom.

I tried to deny it because it would have been so much easier for me to be satiated by being a wife. I wish it could have been part of my trajectory, but it wasn’t.

Kidman thought that she could be both a wife and a working actress at the same time. It worked for a while or at least looked like it did. Things suddenly went downhill in February 2001 and before anyone could tell what was happening, one of the most powerful couples in Hollywood had split up.