He met Kidman during the filming of the 1989 film “Days of Thunder” at the same time that Cruise broke up with Rogers. The two immediately hit it off, with Cruise later revealing (via Newsweek), “My first reaction upon meeting Nick was pure lust… It was completely physical.” According to Entertainment Weekly, the pair married just months after meeting in December 1990 in a private ceremony held in Colorado.
After starring in the 1992 film “Far and Away”, the couple adopted a baby girl, Bella Kidman Cruz, born on December 22, 1992. Bella was adopted following Kidman’s pregnancy loss, which she revealed in a 2007 interview with Vanity Fair. “From the moment Tom and I got married, I wanted to have kids… and we lost a baby early on, so it was really painful. And only then would we adopt.” [our daughter] Bella,” she said (via People). Three years later, Kidman and Cruise adopted their second child, who was named Connor Kidman Cruise, after he was born on January 17, 1995.
For most of the ’90s, the two were one of Hollywood’s greatest couples. They would collaborate on screen again in 1999, starring as lovers in Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut”, but their marriage soon deteriorated. In February 2001, the couple announced their separation. According to Entertainment Weekly, “difficulties inherent in separate careers” were cited as the reason for the end of the relationship in the divorce filing, although many speculated that the split was partly attributed to differences in the couple’s religious beliefs. The couple’s representative at the time, Pat Kingsley, assured, “Scientology has nothing to do with this.”