Nicole Kidman Once Shared She Felt Empty After Winning Her Oscar
Nicole Kidman achieved a career highlight by once winning an Academy Award. But her accomplishment didn’t give her the feelings she hoped it would.
Nicole Kidman won her Oscar for ‘The Hours’
Kidman has been nominated for an Oscar quite a few times, but earned an official win thanks to her role in The Hours. The Hours was a 2002 drama that featured an ensemble cast that included Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore. Kidman portrayed novelist Virginia Woolf, who was struggling with mental health issues while trying to complete another book. Kidman received so much praise for her performance that it won her an Oscar for Best Actress in 2003.
Back then, she considered the Oscar nomination alone to be an unforgettable moment.
“You go wow! This will be something that I remember when I’m an old woman when you look back at it, always think of that,” Kidman once said in an interview with ABC News. “What am I going to be like when I’m an old woman looking back on this particular time period of my life?”
Still, Kidman didn’t expect to win despite the fact that she was seen as the favorite to score the prize.
“No, the favorite — don’t put money on the favorite. Hey, my dad used to take me to the horse races, and we never backed the favorite,” she added.
Nicole Kidman felt empty after her Oscar win
Although most see winning an Oscar as a joyous occasion, at the time Kidman felt anything but. Kidman went through a highly public divorce with her ex-husband Tom Cruise. And without someone to celebrate her win with, it left her victory feeling bittersweet.
“[Winning an Oscar] can show you the emptiness of your own life, which is kind of what it showed me … I was having professional success and my personal life was struggling,” she once said in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar (via Irish Mirror).
But Kidman didn’t have any ill feelings towards Cruise. The actor even called her ex-husband the night she won to share the news with him and their son Connor Cruise.
“It was so important for me to talk to Connor and, yes, to Tom,” Kidman once told People. “We have very different lives now, but as I’ve said to Tom, I will be there for him for the rest of his life, always there.”
A line she said in The Hours even reminded Kidman of the bond she had with Cruise despite their divorce.
“There’s a beautiful moment in The Hours when [Virginia Woolf said], ‘Always the years together, always the hours,’ and Tom and I had 11 years together. Your heart has to stay loving. For the kids, it has to be,” she said.
Nicole Kidman felt depressed after her role in ‘The Hours’
The Hours may have won Kidman Oscar gold, but it also had a brief but significant impact on her mental health. The Being the Ricardos star immersed herself into the character enough to inherit some of Virginia’s own emotional instability.
“And I think I was in a place myself at that time that was removed, depressed, not in my own body,” she once told BBC’s The Cultural Life. “So the idea of Virginia coming through me, I was pretty much an open vessel for it to happen.”
But Kidman also felt that kind of emotional impact was what made acting so alluring.
“I was open to understand it, which I think is probably the beauty of life as an actor,” she said. “There’s a point where you’re like, oh, I have so many experiences now. I’ve delved and traversed many different landscapes of mental health and loss and ideas and joy and raised birth and you know, life is what it is.”
