Heartbreak affects different people in different ways. Last Thursday, Nicole Kidman, a well-paid ambassador for the skincare and make-up brand Cle de Peau, attended a beauty event in New York. She looked every inch an A-list actress, wearing a black Vivienne Westwood gown and donning £35,000 worth of diamond jewelry.

Appearing poised and picture-perfect, she discussed her ‘bravery’ and ‘resilience’ as she ages. At 58, she emphasized that she would not allow her life to be dictated by criticism.

This carefully composed and defensive image contrasts with her open-book husband, musician and songwriter Keith Urban, who, in that same week, performed on stage with 25-year-old rising guitarist and singer Maggie Baugh.

Live-wire Maggie, who always wears hot pants on stage, has been duetting with him on and off since January this year. 

She was plainly delighted when he jokingly and perhaps a little flirtatiously sang: ‘Maggie, I’ll be your guitar player.’

Both of them smiled widely at each other and laughed. She later posted the exchange on Instagram with the caption: ‘Did he just say that?’

Perhaps Maggie’s giggling energy was just what Urban needed, since it now appears his marriage to Kidman is over, having ‘suddenly’ unravelled in late June this year – news that was confirmed to the website TMZ on Monday night. Indeed, last night it emerged that Kidman filed for divorce yesterday.

One Nashville source, who expressed genuine sadness at the end of their marriage after 19 years, spoke yesterday of Kidman’s apparent ‘second teenagerhood’ and of her ‘bottomless need for sexual attention’ as possible drivers of the split.

Sources in the Kidman camp, meanwhile, are briefing that she didn’t want the marriage to end, and had fought for it.

They add that she is being comforted by her sister Antonia (who was much in evidence when her marriage to Tom Cruise collapsed in 2001).

‘Nicole’s sister has been a rock and the entire Kidman family has come together to support one another,’ a source told People, adding: ‘She didn’t want this. She has been fighting to save the marriage.’

It’s no exaggeration to say that the whole city of Nashville is agog. She and Urban, 57, – and their two children Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 14 – were very much a part of the community in Tennessee.

The family were popular with locals, and I’m told you’d see them having dinner together ‘like regular folks’.

A source said yesterday: ‘You would see Nicole out at the shops, with a bodyguard, but she was very much a part of the community. They support the local sports teams, go to the local restaurants, all the regular stuff.’

Around a year ago, a mutual friend was at a brunch party when Urban and Kidman showed up. ‘They seemed really so happy. They turned up after church for the brunch. She was particularly all over him, nuzzling his neck. It was just like what you see on the red carpet. Everyone believed that it was a rock solid marriage.’

That doesn’t happen without effort. As Kidman said in 2018: ‘I think it’s knowing that you have to keep contributing to what we call the ‘us’. You go, “Does this work for us?”,’ she said. ‘When you make an us, it’s yours together – that’s what you create. Nobody else has that. It’s just between the two of you.’

At the end of last year, Urban went to Las Vegas for a musical residency consisting of ten shows and took the whole family with him. 

‘They took a house in Vegas so that they could be together,’ I’m told. But after a busy period for both Urban and Kidman this spring, the marriage fell apart.

They are both Australian, and met at a ‘G’Day LA’ event for Aussies in Hollywood in 2005. After exchanging phone numbers, it took him four months to pluck up the courage to call her.

They were married in 2006 – musician Urban said he was in awe of his ‘real-life princess’ wife, while Kidman explained that they were two lonely people who had to be brave enough to find each other.

Almost straight away, there was a crisis: Urban had to go into rehab for cocaine and alcohol abuse. As he recalled last year: ‘Four months into our marriage, I’m in rehab for three months. 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.’

That was his third rehab for alcohol and cocaine use, and he says that he has been sober ever since. 

Yet not long after he emerged from rehab, another crisis arose: Model Amanda Wyatt accused him of cheating on Kidman with her multiple times in the run-up to the wedding, and said they had done drugs together.

Wyatt said: ‘Keith told me: “Everyone thinks I have everything, but I can’t be happy. I have this huge gaping hole inside of me I just can’t fill.” I felt sorry for him, but I think he filled that hole with drugs.’

Urban’s publicist denounced the account as ‘false’.

Whatever the truth, the marriage seemed to work. In a recent interview, Urban said the flames of lust burned so brightly for his wife that she would sometimes wake him in the middle of the night for sex, because she needed to have him at that very minute.

The marriage had seemed transformative for them both. Urban had been living in Nashville since 1999 and Kidman moved there from Hollywood for him. He is a country music star, and while they have other houses – in LA and in Portugal – Nashville is home.

Yet it’s Kidman who’s been in this property, a seven-bedroom mansion with plenty of woodland, for the past three weeks, ever since completing three months of filming on Practical Magic 2 in London. Indeed she was out locally supporting Nashville Film Festival last weekend.

Before then, she had spent some of the early summer in Australia with her sister and family.

Meanwhile, Urban, according to reports, has moved out to a bachelor pad elsewhere in Nashville. They were last seen together on June 20 at a Club World Cup football match in the city.

Five days later she wished him a happy anniversary on Instagram, posting an old black and white picture of them with the words: ‘Happy Anniversary Baby’. He responded with a heart emoji – no words, and no post of his own.

Since then, complete silence between them. He didn’t even appear to respond to an Instagram video of her and their daughter Sunday Rose (who wants to model) modelling for Cle de Peau.

What has happened? There has always been gossip about the marriage, all the more in recent years as Kidman has appeared to take on every project going. Some have been shlocky – like two series of Nine Perfect Strangers and the Netflix film A Family Affair.

But Babygirl, the film in which she played a high-powered executive in a sexually submissive affair with a dominant intern, was genuinely shocking, with Kidman crawling, naked to lap milk from a saucer. Kidman said in interviews that she became tired of having so many orgasms during filming, and played along with the film’s social media hype by drinking a glass of milk on stage at a film event in January.

She won the Volpi Cup for Best Actress at Venice Film Festival for the performance and had hopes of an Oscar nomination (which she didn’t get).

She also campaigned hard after being nominated for a Golden Globe, even having voters over to her house in LA for a screening and charm offensive. It didn’t work – but there is a sense that she has been very determined to reach a career peak again on the back of her willingness to fly the flag for ‘kink’ cinema.

Some think that it won’t have done her marriage any good.

‘Did she think about what her teenagers would think – or her husband?’ says the Nashville source. ‘Or was she just thinking about whether she might win an award?’

The source adds: ‘The word is that she is a very highly sexual person, that’s the reputation, and she has never shied away from expressing that on screen.

‘People are speculating that there has been a betrayal on one side or another.

‘I hear the briefing that the relationship had run its course, but you don’t cast aside a 19-year-long marriage because someone’s been working a bit too much. Something serious has to have happened which someone cannot get past.

‘People are wondering here if the end of Hugh Jackman’s marriage has made them feel like heading for the door.

‘Nic and Keith were genuinely very close with Hugh and [his ex-wife] Deborra. Sometimes when you see another couple seeking fulfilment outside of a long marriage it can be an idea that catches on.’ 

(Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness, guests at Urban and Kidman’s wedding, split in 2023, and he is now in a relationship with actress Sutton Foster.)

Certainly, by July, Urban was not comfortable when asked about his wife and her sex scenes.

‘What does Keith Urban think when he sees his beautiful wife with beautiful younger men like Zac Efron having these beautiful love scenes on TV and radio?’ one of the hosts of a radio show asked. Instead of answering the question, Urban simply disconnected from the call.

Later that month, it turned out he had failed to submit information to the Portuguese authorities relating to his permit to live in Cascais, Portugal, but Kidman had done so for hers.

A spokesman said Urban was busy touring but would get to it in due course.

Some of Kidman’s behaviour has been unexpected. She was spotted dancing on her own in a singlet at a Charli XCX concert in New York five months ago, for example. With her hair in a pony tail and dark glasses, she almost passed for a teenager like the rest of the audience.

Was this a sign of a midlife crisis – or second teenagerhood?

And on the set of Babygirl, according to co-star Harris Dickinson, she was a revelation. He said: ‘Nicole has got this mad playfulness as a performer. She’s so bold with stuff. She’s not scared to try stuff.

‘And then you think, oh, I can try stuff as well. The rave, for example. A lot of that was scripted, but she just threw herself into it. She was, like, grabbing people and kissing them and stuff.’

Another huge factor was surely the unexpected death of her mother, in September last year. She said: ‘Losing my mother changed every part of me. I spoke to her every second or third day.

‘And because she was on the other side of the world, if I woke up at 5am, I’d get up, I’d walk around the block and I’d talk to her for an hour before the girls got up, before Keith got up. That was the rhythm of my day.’

Perhaps the loss of her mother made her realise she had lived for a longer time than she had left?

In September last year, when Kidman had just finished making the second series of Lioness and was about to film, in quick succession, the TV shows Scarpetta and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Urban released a new album.

It was titled – startlingly, given that he’s been to rehab three times – High. And in an emotional post launching the album, he said that music and his joy in it was his one constant. ‘Life is about contrasts – highs, lows, confidence, insecurity, love found, love lost… sexy warm summers and lonely cold winters.’

Why was he talking about ‘love lost’? And why, you may wonder, are several of the songs on it clearly heartbreak anthems?

Take Messed Up As Me. He sings: ‘When you get mad, you stay that way/ And you always say you’re doin’ OK/ But we both know it’s probably a lie/ And you’re fallin’ to pieces on the inside/ And you’re out tonight like you always are/ You’re dressed to kill, and your lips are red, and misery still loves company/ Are you as messed up as me and all alone?’

Whether or not it’s been a creative inspiration, for Kidman and Urban, the end of a 19-year marriage is no doubt a cause of deep sadness too.