They once lit up Hollywood red carpets with their steamy displays of affection, but insiders reveal the heat between Nicole Kidman and her husband Keith Urban had significantly cooled in recent months.
After the Daily Mail confirmed Monday that actress Kidman, 58, and country singer Urban, 57, have sensationally separated after 19 years of marriage and two children together, sources suggest it was a lack of intimacy — as well as their busy schedules — that ultimately led to the split.
‘Keith never sees Nicole, either she is filming or he is on tour,’ one source tells the Daily Mail.
‘There was a lot of love between the two and they might not divorce. They been together for decades so there is a world which they can reconcile, but the way their pairing is now, they are not a couple.’
It is understood that Urban was the one to instigate the split, with his ‘unhappiness’ in the marriage prompting him to ‘call her out’. Kidman, however, was ‘blindsided’ by her husband’s intervention, the source said.
Ubran’s main complaint appears to have been an increased coldness between the couple.
‘The intimacy isn’t there, they are just going through the motions [of being married]. If this separation gets them back together, that would be amazing, but Keith had to call her out that he isn’t happy,’ the source continued.
‘She was blindsided, but we shall see how things go during the holiday season and his upcoming birthday [next month]. They have some work to do.’
The Daily Mail reached out to representatives for the pair who have been unavailable for comment.
Kidman and Urban share daughters Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 14.
Another source close to the Australian actress says that, since the split, she has been taking care of the children and holding the family together through this difficult time while Urban has been away.
The country star has been on his High and Alive World Tour since May. He is due to perform in Hershey, Pennsylvania on Thursday.
Kidman and the children, meanwhile, have remained in Nashville, where the couple own a $4million compound. TMZ reported Monday that ‘Keith has acquired his own residence in Nashville and has moved out of their family home.’
Over the summer, the actress and her young kids stayed in England while she filmed the sequel to her 1998 movie Practical Magic. She was paying a reported £65,000 ($87,000) each month to rent a luxurious Hampstead mansion once owned by pop star Boy George.
While the London move was for work, it certainly raised eyebrows back in Kidman’s native Australia.
‘[Kidman and Urban] do make an effort to speak every day when they’re apart, but it is shocking how much time they’ve spent apart since Nicole’s mother died last September,’ an insider told local magazine Woman’s Day earlier this month. ‘It’s like they both went their separate ways.’
In July, Urban dropped a hint that all was not well between the pair when he dramatically hung up during a phone interview with a radio station after a crude question about Kidman’s raunchy recent scenes, such as in her movies Babygirl and A Family Affair.
For her part, and while promoting her Netflix series The Perfect Couple back in September last year, Kidman admitted there was no such thing as a ‘perfect’ marriage.
‘There’s no perfect anything,’ she said, ‘anything that’s presented as perfect… forget it.’
Kidman was previously married to actor Tom Cruise for 11 years from 1990 to 2001. They adopted two children together.
