Happy anniversary to Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman! The couple tied the knot on June 25, 2006, at the Cardinal Cerretti Memorial Chapel, on the grounds of St Patrick’s Estate in Sydney, Australia.
The couple met in January of 2005, at a G’Day LA event in Hollywood. Their attraction was instant, although it took Urban a while to muster up the courage to call the actress.
“Somebody had given me her number, and I had it in my pocket for a while,” Urban said (via ELLE). “I kept looking at it thinking, ‘If I call this number, she’s going to answer. I don’t know what [to] say.’ 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 [dial] those numbers, and she answered, and we started talking. And we talked and talked and talked and talked, and it was effortless.”
Kidman still vividly recalls the moment she knew Urban might be The One — or at least she hoped it was — and it was very, very early in their relationship.
“It was my [38th] birthday, and he stood outside with gardenias at 5:00 AM. on my stoop in New York,” Kidman recalled to People of their date, which took them to Woodstock, New York for the day. “That is when I went, ‘This is the man I hope I get to marry.’”
Urban and Kidman’s newlywed bliss was short-lived, unfortunately. Only four months after they said “I do,” Urban checked into the Betty Ford Center in California, at his wife’s insistence, to deal with substance abuse that had plagued him for years.
“I remember just feeling so terrified,” Urban admitted to Rolling Stone. “We had just gotten married and this entity in my life is coming just to crush and kill everything that I’ve got. Everything that’s good. And I was making [a] record during that whole period, trying desperately to keep that entity out of my life. And I was struggling with my voice, I was just struggling with everything.”
Urban recently opened up about that pivotal moment in their relationship, and his fear that his addictions had ruined his marriage shortly after it began.
“We got married in June 2006 and barely four months into our marriage, my addictions that I’d done really nothing about, blew our marriage to smithereens,” Urban shared (via People). “And I went into the Betty Ford Center for three months. Four months into a marriage I’m in rehab for three months. I had no idea what was going to happen to us.”
Perhaps no one was more surprised than Urban that Kidman stuck by him, with their relationship now stronger than ever, thanks in large part to her resilience.
“If you want to see what love in action really looks like, give that a whirl,” Urban said. “Nic pushed through every negative voice, I’m sure even some of her own. And she chose love. And here we are…18 years later.”
Urban and Kidman have two girls, 16-year-old Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret, 13. It’s Kidman who Urban says excels at parenting, and is why his daughters are doing so well in spite of having two famous parents.
“She’s an extraordinary mum, she really, really is,” Urban told Universal Music Group. “Those girls are very, very lucky, and I feel very lucky that the children I should have in this world happen to be with Nic. I don’t know anything about raising kids and Nic does, and that comes in extremely — it’s really made for an experience I wouldn’t have had without that. Her patience, her recognizing them as people and not just little kids is really extraordinary. Her attention to honoring their feelings and listening to them right from day one – really being attentive to that is not how I was raised at all, so it’s really beautiful to see.”