Winning an Oscar was very strange... I was the loneliest I’ve ever been

been key to her success o over three decades in Hollywood. M Married to Cruise, she enjoyed huge suc success in the Nineties with critically accla acclaimed roles in films such as To Die For, Eyes Wide Shut and Days Of Thunder.

But in 2001 the couple divo divorced amid rumours of rows over Cruise’s S Scientology beliefs and the pair’s lifestyle lifestyles.

This spurred Nicole on to ev even greater heights. She starred in Baz L Luhrmann’s dazzling musical Moulin Rou Rouge! and in the gripping horror film The Others.

Strange

She followed these star turns with parts in the American Civil War saga Cold Mountain and as writerwrite Virginia Woolf in The Hours, which won her an Oscar. She admitted the divorce u unleashed a period of creativity but added:add “I was running from my life at that time. “I wasn’t able to handle th the reality of my life and, as an actor, you can get los lost in somebody else’s life and become somebodysom else for a time.” Yet winning the Oscar in 2003 was “very strange” for Nicole and not the moment of triumph she was expecting.

She said: “I was the loneliest I had ever been. I hoped the success was going to heal me and it didn’t. I needed to really hone in on what I wanted as a woman and for my life.”

She took a step back from her non-stop work schedule and within two years met Keith through pals at a small event in LA. The rest is history.

Now the glam star enjoys nothing more than tending to her garden. She said: “I have roses. I love flowers and I suppose because of the life I live, I meditate, I pray, but I garden as well.

“I sound like such an old woman but I love that my kids wake up, come down and say, ‘Look at your roses, Mama,’.

“I grow those roses. They are my roses. I watch them die, I watch them bloom, and we smell them, we choose which rose to plant. It’s very difficult to grow roses in Nashville. They are my pride and joy.” Nature-lover Nicole also has a vegetable patch where she encourages her daughters to learn about living off the land. And while she enjoys the culture of cities such as New York she also needs peace and quiet. She said: “I like being able to just move at my own pace and I find it very nourishing. “That’s where we all nourish ourselves.” As well as nourishing her family, she also wants t o protect others and is a strong advocate for women’s rights in film. She said: “When people say there’s no need for feminism any more because there is equality we all know that’s not true. “I think the world is changing in the sense of the need and the desire for equality between the sexes but there’s still an enormous way to go. “That’s why there is the need for female equality. It is not equal.”