Divorce can be ugly. And when the spotlight is on you, separating from your partner becomes a headline and topic of conversation worldwide. In rare moments of vulnerability, celebrities have opened up about the most difficult times of their lives and how they got through it. Whether it was their age, incompatibility, or fame, something didn't stick for these couples. Here's what 10 stars have to say about why they got divorced and what they learned through the process.
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Nicole Kidman
“There were times following [the divorce] when I thought, ‘Wow, this is the loneliest, loneliest existence,’” Kidman told WHO magazine in 2012. “But with Tom [Cruise], it was a fantastic decade. I wish all of the people that have been involved in my life well, because it’s very important to me to be in a place of forgiveness and love.”
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Naomi Watts
“I mean, I’m single, I’m co-parenting. I’m doing okay,” she told Vogue Australia in May 2017. “There are good days and bad days and Liev and I are on great terms and we’re trying to do our absolute best for the sake of the children and we hope to keep moving forward in that way.”
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Reese Witherspoon
“There are things in my life that are hard to reconcile, like divorce,” she said in a 2008 Parade interview, of her breakup with Ryan Philippe. “Sometimes it is very difficult to make sense of how it could possibly happen. Laying blame is so easy. I don’t have time for hate or negativity in my life. There’s no room for it. When you make wrong choices, you have to take responsibility for them: ‘What part of this do I own?'”
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Miranda Kerr
“When Orlando [Bloom] and I separated [in 2013], I actually fell into a really bad depression,” she told Elle Canada in 2016. “I never understood the depth of that feeling or the reality of that because I was naturally a very happy person.”
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Angelina Jolie
“It’s just been the hardest time, and we’re just kind of coming up for air,” she said of her split from Brad Pitt in a 2017 interview with Vanity Fair. “[This house] is a big jump forward for us, and we’re all trying to do our best to heal our family.”
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Robin Wright
“Divorce in and of itself, and with children, is devastating,” she told Telegraph of her divorce from Sean Penn in February 2014. “Worse than that. One of the reasons why we got back together and broke up so much was trying to keep the family together. If you’ve got kids, it’s a family, and you try again, and you try again. We did that for a long time.”
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Jennifer Lopez
“When my marriage ended, it was not easy to find forgiveness,” she told W magazine in April 2016. “It wasn’t the dream that I had hoped for, and it would have been easier to fan the flames of resentment, disappointment, and anger. But Marc is the father of my children [8-year-old twins], and that’s never going away. So, I have to work to make things right. And that is, by far, the hardest work I do.”
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Kim Basinger
“Divorce is hard on a kid, no matter how you cut it,” she told The Edit by Net-A-Porter in April 2016 about her divorce from Alec Baldwin. “And ours was very public and nasty. So I brought up Ireland in a very unconventional way. I just wanted her to be free. If she wanted to have her friends over and write over the walls with pen, that was fine. I wanted her childhood to be full of love and light and animals and friends.”
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Madonna
“When you start off, everything’s great and lovely, and the person you’ve married is flawless, and you’re flawless,” she told Newsweek in January 2012. “Then time goes by, and you share a life, you have children, and there are cracks in the veneer. It’s not as romantic as it used to be. You think, ‘This isn’t what I thought it was going to be,’ and ‘How much am I willing to sacrifice?’”
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Amy Poehler
"Imagine spreading everything you care about on a blanket and then tossing the whole thing up in the air,” she wrote of her divorce from husband Will Arnett in her 2014 book Yes Please. “The process of divorce is about loading that blanket, throwing it up, watching it all spin, and worrying what stuff will break when it lands.”
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