Nicole Kidman Says the Night She Won the Best Actress Oscar in 2003 Was Difficult: “I Went to Bed Alone”

Ostensibly, the night that Nicole Kidman won an Academy Award for Best Actress should have been one of the happiest nights of her life. In her profession, there is no greater achievement, and Kidman took home her first Oscar in 2003 for playing Virginia Woolf in The Hours. (She had also been nominated the year prior for Moulin Rouge!.)

But it wasn’t one of the happiest nights of her life—in fact, People reports, it was one of the loneliest. When you accomplish an achievement like that, it’s better when shared, and Kidman and ex-husband Tom Cruise had only recently finalized their divorce after 11 years of marriage. She hadn’t yet met current husband Keith Urban, who she married in 2006.

It was quite the paradox: reaching the highest of highs professionally while being in the lowest of lows personally. As People puts it, “behind her bright smile and glamorous Jean-Paul Gaultier gown [at the 2003 Oscars] hid a private struggle.” 

“I was struggling with things in my personal life, yet my professional life was going so well,” Kidman told Dave Karger in his new book 50 Oscar Nights, which comes out January 23. “That’s what happens, right?”

Onstage accepting the award, Kidman broke down briefly before composing herself. (“Russell Crowe said, ‘don’t cry when you get up there,’ and now I’m crying,” she said.) She was played off before she could finish her speech, and after the ceremony, she just wanted to go home.

“I’m not a big party girl, so I was going to skip the Vanity Fair party, and everyone was like, ‘You’ve got to go. You’ve got to walk through the party carrying your Academy Award,’” Kidman said. “I said, ‘That just feels like gloating, and it doesn’t feel humble.’ Like, what? You can’t walk through carrying the award! That feels really inappropriate. They’re like, ‘That’s what you do.’”

So Kidman went, at least for a little bit, with her Oscar in hand. “So I literally walked in, carried it around, was completely overwhelmed, emotional, shaking, and I didn’t enjoy it,” she said. “I was almost apologetic, which is so stupid. I wish I could have enjoyed it more.”

Afterwards, in the quiet of her hotel room, Kidman was confronted with loneliness—and she knew she wanted to find love again. “I went home and ended up ordering takeout and eating it on the floor of the Beverly Hills Hotel,” she said. “I sat on the floor of the hotel eating French fries and a burger with my family and went to bed. That’s when it hit me. I went, ‘I need to find my life; I need a love in my life.’ Because this is supposed to be when you go, ‘This is ours.’”

Instead of exuberance, Kidman’s Oscar night ended with a whimper. “I went to bed alone,” she said. “I was in bed before midnight. If I ever won again, I’m telling you, I’d be out for 24 hours.”

Two years later, she and Urban began dating after meeting at a G’Day USA gala in L.A. Six months in, Kidman realized he was the one when, for her 38th birthday, Urban stood on the stoop of her apartment at 5 a.m. with a bouquet of gardenias. “That is when I went, ‘This is the man I hope I get to marry,’” she later said. “I believed by that point he was the love of my life.”

They share daughters Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret; Kidman is also mother to Isabella and Connor, who she shares with Cruise. Of Urban, Kidman told Gayle King in 2022 “I met him later in life and it’s been the best thing that’s ever happened to me. That man is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

Married 17 years, her personal life is solid, but so is her professional life: she has won two Emmys since then (for Big Little Lies) and has been nominated for an Oscar three times (for Rabbit Hole, Lion, and Being the Ricardos).