Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise split in 2001 after eleven long years of marriage. Though the two have mostly maintained their silence on their split and never spoken about their together time to media, the Australian actress has now opened up to the recent issue of Vanity Fair magazine and revealed the real reason why the two split. Read on.

Kidman, who is now happily married to Keith Urban whom she calls her "great love," was just 23 when she married the "Top Gun" star. They went ahead and adopted two kids soon after.

"I was so young," Nicole Kidman explains as she reflects back to the time spent with Tom Cruise. "And you know, with no disrespect to what I had with Tom, I've met my great love now. And I really did not know if that was going to happen," she says.

Kidman says she got married too early in her life when she should have been doing other things. She wanted to get settled and have kids but 23 was not the right age to have done so. Tom was 28 then.

"I wanted it, but I didn't want it for a while, because I didn't want to jump from one relationship to another. I had a lot of time alone, which was really, really good, because I was a child, really, when I got married. And I needed to grow up," the Aussie beauty tells the magazine for their December issue.

The couple got married when Kidman who was playing the character of very famous writer Virginia Woolf in "The Hours" where the character commits suicide. Kidman had to shoot for Wolf's suicide scene and that is when she realised how much she wanted to live.

"Walking into the river with those stones in my pockets-I chose life. At the time, I was at a low point, and by playing her, it put me into a place of appreciating life," Kidman said.

So how did she and Tom handled fame at that time? Was it one of the factors which lead to the divorce of the couple?

"There is something about that sort of existence that, if you really focus on each other and you're in that bubble, it's very intoxicating, because it's just the two of you. And there is only one other person that's going through it," Kidman says.

However Nicole says that it actually brings you together as is the case with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie now.

"So it brings you very close, and it's deeply romantic. I'm sure Brad and Angelina have that-because there's nobody else that understands it except that person who's sleeping right next to you," she says.

Kidman has however chosen to live a quite life with her husband Keith in Nashville and says she doesn't miss Hollywood. "The whole business side of it-it's too present. It doesn't suit me," she explains.

"I have stepped away from the fame part of it. I didn't find what I was looking for in fame," says the mother of two. Read the full interview in the Vanity Fair's November issue.