After Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise split, Oscar wasn’t the cure for what ailed her

The upside of the pain of divorce? If you’re Nicole Kidman, it helped you win an Oscar.

“I was running from my life at that time. I wasn’t able to handle the reality of my life,” the actress said at the Women in the World summit this week in New York City, discussing the period of professional creativity that followed her 2001 breakup with actor Tom Cruise.

“And as an actor you have this wonderful thing where you can get lost in someone else’s life and become somebody else for a period of time. And when I look back on it I really see that.”

Out of that dark stretch came “work that was really applauded,” the 48-year-old continued -- work that included her Academy Award-winning performance in “The Hours.”

Winning, she said, “caused an epiphany which was ... this is not the answer ... holding this gold statue ... I was sitting in the Beverly Hills hotel, and it was all extraordinary, and I was the loneliest I’d ever been.

After that, she embraced her own life and took a few years to get herself together.

Then she “stumbled” into Keith Urban, who’s now her husband, after deciding she wanted a partner to share her life with and have more kids with.

Kidman said luck had little to do with their coupling up. Rather, she said, she had to be “open to it and willing to compromise and willing to change. .... That meant moving to a different place.” (That would be country star Urban’s home base, Nashville.)

Another compromise? “I wanted to have a baby the minute we met. And he was like, ‘No.’”

That did, of course, happen eventually: Kidman is the mother of two children she adopted with Cruise, one that she had naturally with Urban and one with Urban that was carried by a surrogate.

“I love children,” she said. “I love children.”

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