It was supposed to be a perfect match. Tom and Nicole, two young celebrities at the height of international fame, capturing our attention all throughout their marriage, which spanned the 1990s. They weren't just well-known in their own right — they became a star couple, their union itself a lightning rod for media attention. They acted opposite each other in Stanley Kubrick's erotic final film, Eyes Wide Shut in 1999, and were touted as a pair of sex symbols worthy of envy. They had children, they had fame.
Seemingly, they had it all — and it all fell apart. Why?
The Tom and Nicole relationship started in 1989, where they connected through — where else? — Hollywood. Kidman was a rising star, fresh from a string of Australian films and miniseries which had won her increasing accolades and attention in her country, the highest being the Australian Film Institute's Best Television Actress award, which she won at the age of 17. It was during a viewing of the 1989 Australian film Dead Calm that Tom first set eyes on Nicole, according to Vanity Fair. Impressed with what he saw, he began putting things in motion to meet her in person to maybe cast her in a movie — and perhaps more, being that at the time he was in the process of divorcing from his first wife, Mimi Rogers.
So they met, and in short, Nicole fell hard for Tom. And she'd be the first to tell you so. "He basically swept me off my feet," she told Vanity Fair in 2002. "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.'" Together, the duo starred as romantic opposites in 1990's Days of Thunder, and once Tom's divorce was through, married the same year. At the time, Tom was 28, and Nicole was 23
They had a hard time growing their family
As things were beginning, there seemed to be no sign of the future misgivings that would tear the couple apart. In their breaks from movie shoots, they did fun things like skydiving together, and Nicole's enthusiasm for her husband, and starting a family, was evident. "I was desperate to have a baby with him." she later said to Vanity Fair. "I didn't care if we were married."
They tried for children together, unsuccessfully, and chose instead to adopt two children over the course of three years, Isabella and Connor, born in 1992 and 1995, respectively. They would raise the kids together up until their divorce after the decade's end in 2001.
Religion got in the way
n what should have seemed inevitable from the very beginning, fractures in the marriage started to occur over a very specific ideological split — Tom was (and remains) a Scientologist, and Nicole was not, and seemingly had no intentions on ever becoming one. And if you've been keeping up with Scientology scrutiny in the news lately, it shouldn't surprise you to hear that a union like that doesn't have much of a chance, long-term.
As has been extensively covered in Lawrence Wright's book Going Clear, and the accompanying documentary film by Alex Gibney, the biggest source of friction between Tom and Nicole came from forces outside their marriage — and inside Tom's church. Supposedly, the story goes, leaders in Scientology were so concerned that Nicole was pulling Tom away from Scientology, they began to conspire to end the marriage, something it had been rumored they had previously done with Tom's first wife, Mimi Rogers. Marriages are hard enough to keep together without billion-dollar organizations reportedly pulling at every frayed thread, so the idea that this meddling would lead to the end of their marriage is not a hard pill to swallow at all.
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