Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban feel lucky to have found each other more than 16 years ago. Although the Nine Perfect Strangers actress and the “Wild Hearts” country music singer met later in life — both were 37 years old at the time — the two don’t remember what it was like before they fell in love.
Nicole and Keith first met in January 2005 at the G'Day USA gala in Los Angeles, an annual event honoring Australian talent. Speaking on The Oprah Winfrey Show in November 2010, Keith recalled wanting to meet Nicole at the function where they were being recognized alongside actor Mel Gibson.
“I swear to you, she glided across the room, like floated. I don’t know how she did it,” he told host Oprah Winfrey. “It was out of this world and there was a split moment where she wasn’t with anybody, there was nobody around, and I thought, ‘I’ll just go up and say hi.’”
“I plucked up the courage to go and do it, very nervously, and trying to be cool,” he continued. After introducing himself to Nicole, Keith admitted that he didn’t know what else to say and he quickly said goodbye. But almost instantly, he realized that he had made a mistake of leaving her side too soon.
“’Was I supposed to say more?’” Keith said. “A friend of mine said, ‘I think she wanted to talk to you.’ And I was like ‘Me? Why would she want to talk to me?’ So, I went back over and apologized, and we just started talking and just really clicked.”
Meanwhile, Nicole remembers having “such a crush on him” but she thought he wasn't interested in her. "He didn't call me for four months,” she said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2017. And it’s true, Keith took several weeks to call Nicole, but it wasn’t because he didn’t want to do it. He thought "she was way out of [his] league."
"Somebody had given me her number and I had it in my pocket for a while. I kept looking at it thinking, 'If I call this number, she's going to answer. I don't know what [to] say'," he said on the Australian talk show Interview in 2018. "I wasn’t in a very healthy place in my life. I'd never have thought she’d see anything in a guy like me. But at some point, I plucked up the courage to call those numbers and she answered, and we started talking and we talked and talked and talked and talked and it was effortless."
This phone call would mark the start of their whirlwind relationship. By Nicole’s 38th birthday in June 2005, only a month after their first phone exchange, she knew Keith was her person. “It was my [38th] birthday, and he stood outside with gardenias at 5 a.m. on my stoop in New York,” she told People in 2019. “That is when I went, ‘This is the man I hope I get to marry.'”
Keith then whisked Nicole away to the legendary music festival location Woodstock in upstate New York on his motorcycle. “It was pretty intense,” Nicole said to the magazine. “I believed by that point he was the love of my life. Maybe that’s because I am deeply romantic, or I’m an actress, or I have strong faith as well, but I just believed, ‘Oh, okay, here he is.'”
A year later, on June 25, 2006, Keith and Nicole became husband and wife in a candlelit ceremony in Manly, Australia. "Meeting [Nicole] and getting married wasn't life-changing, it was life-beginning," Keith told CBS News in May 2016. "It was literally, like, 'OK, life starts.'"
Four months after enjoying their honeymoon in French Polynesia, the two faced their first challenge as a married couple. Following an intervention put together by Nicole, Keith checked himself into the Betty Ford Center in Palm Springs, California for alcohol abuse treatment. He had previously admitted himself into rehab in 1998 for cocaine use. But the second time around, he had Nicole’s love and support during this three-month stay.
"I caused the implosion of my fresh marriage," Keith told Rolling Stone in 2016. “It survived, but it’s a miracle it did. I was spiritually awoken with her. I use the expression ‘I was born into her,’ and that’s how I feel. And for the first time in my life, I could shake off the shackles of addiction.”
Fast forward, Keith and Nicole welcomed their first child, a daughter named Sunday Rose, on July 7, 2008. Two years later, their family grew again with the arrival of their second daughter, Faith Margaret, on December 28, 2010 via surrogate. While the duo has kept their children out of the Hollywood spotlight they have been featured as extras on Nicole’s HBO Max drama Big Little Lies and attended the virtual 2021 Golden Globes show. (See them in the video above at the 5:35 mark.)
Through it all, the pair’s love has grown tenfold, and Keith only has one person to thank for leading the way. He shared with The Boot earlier this summer the incredible impact his wife has had on him.
"I don't even know if she's changed my life; she's given me a life. There's seemingly no relevance to my previous life before meeting her. I have such deep love and gratitude for everything she's done for me."
