“[I was] like, ‘I don’t care. I’m in love. I want to be married’.”
Her friends later said “see, we told you” after she started to be known simply as Cruise’s wife, she added.
“[I was] like, so what? I wasn’t meant to marry the man I love? Of course I’ll throw my career away, I don’t care.”
Kidman, 59, has previously described how Cruise swept her off her feet, causing her to “fall madly, passionately in love”.
Before marrying Cruise, now 64, Kidman had appeared in the popular Australian TV series Five Mile Creek.
She secured a number of film roles before her big Hollywood break in Days of Thunder in 1990, where she met Cruise.
Neither party has ever confirmed the reason for their split, although Kidman later said she needed “a very long time to heal”.
Despite suffering emotionally from the divorce, she claimed centre stage when she won the best actress Oscar for her role in the psychological drama The Hours in 2003.
Kidman went on to marry Keith Urban, 58, the musician, in June 2006, and they share two daughters, Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 15.
However, last September, the couple parted after 19 years together.
Speaking about the breakup she said: “There was a point where I was very fearful and deeply vulnerable, which is exposing. And then at the same time I’m going, ‘Well, I can either really not confront it and just curl up, or I can just go forward with an enormous amount of hope’.”
She said she had a “different view of what my life was going to be” before the decision to split up.
“You make all these plans and you have all these ideas of what it’s all going to be like and then it’s … not. You have to adjust. You adapt. The future, it’s completely unknown to me right now.”