Nicole Kidman Was 'Running Away' From Life After Tom Cruise Divorce

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(WireImage)

Nicole Kidman remembers precisely how it felt the night she took home the Oscar for Best Actress in 2003, two years after her high-profile and heartbreaking divorce from Tom Cruise. And it was that feeling that pushed her to become the happier woman she is today.

“To be completely honest, I was running away from my life at that time,” Kidman revealed during a panel conversation at the Women in the World Summit in London. “I was running away from the reality of my life. And as an actor, you have this wonderful thing where you can go and get lost in somebody else’s life and become somebody else for a period of time."

Kidman, now 48, did just that while working steadily and finding critical success over the next few years in movies such as The Hours and Moulin Rouge. She was eventually awarded what is arguably the most important prize in film, prompting what she called an epiphany.

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"Which was [that] actually, this is not the answer… Holding this gold statue — and I was sitting in the Beverly Hills Hotel and it was all extraordinary — and I was the loneliest I’d ever been,” she said. “And that was a very strange thing to have happen and it was a fantastic thing to have happen, because I was jolted out of this… need or desire to say, ‘This is gonna heal me,’ and it didn’t. And then I went, 'I need to really hone in on what I want as a woman and for my life.’"

After that, Kidman said she took time to do a lot of reading and talking to the "extraordinary minds” that she’s encountered in her career.

By 2006, Kidman was engaged to country star Keith Urban, the father of daughters Sunday, 7, and Faith, 4. Not that any of it happened by accident, since she knew she wanted a partner and children in addition to the now adult ones, Connor and Isabella, that she shares with Cruise.

Related: Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s Daughter Isabella Cruise Marries

“I stumbled into Keith… and in my spontaneous way, got married,” Kidman said. “We got married very quickly and we got to know each other when we were married."

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Kidman was willing to compromise on issues such as where to live and when to bring more children into their family, to get what she wanted in the end. She and Urban, a fellow Aussie, married that year and started a family in Nashville.

"I wanted to have a baby the minute we met,” she said with a laugh. “He was like, 'No.’”