Christmas Eve 2000 was a holiday in the Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman household for more reasons than one - it was the couple's tenth wedding anniversary. On that night, at their Los Angeles home, before a small gathering of their closest friends, they celebrated by renewing their wedding vows. In the impromptu ceremony, they played each other's favorite songs on the stereo. "It was very romantic, very intimate," according to an insider.

A little more than a month later, the romance and intimacy were no more. A brief statement issued by their publicist, Pat Kingsley, on February 5 said they had "regretfully decided to separate. The couple, who married in 1990, stressed their great respect for each other, both personally and professionally," the statement continued. "Citing the difficulties inherent in divergent careers which constantly keep them apart, they concluded that an amicable separation seemed best for both of them at this time."

In retrospect, of course, there seems to have been signs. At the Golden Globe Awards ceremony on January 21, Cruise, 38, and Kidman, 33, posed only briefly for photographers - a sure sign in Hollywood that something is amiss. Even earlier - on December 20, 2000, at the birthday party for Cruise's production-company partner, Paula Wagner, held at the restaurant Tao in New York - Cruise was reportedly "in a phenomenal mood," table-hopping, autographing menus and chatting up the chef, while a morose Kidman looked on. "For the entire three hours, she sat there looking unhappy," said a partygoer. "She seemed kind of left out."

Maybe she was. On December 5, 2000, Cruise had attended a U2 concert in New York without Kidman. Three days later, at the wrap party for his movie "Vanilla Sky," Cruise jumped on the bar and downed a pint of ale in one long, raucous gulp to the cheers of his castmates and friends - but with Kidman nowhere in sight.

Kidman's absence may have been explained by a knee injury, which later forced her out of her next movie, "The Panic Room;" but she and Cruise were always a somewhat mysterious couple. Unlike most stars, they were rarely spotted out on the town, shopping in Beverly Hills or working out in a trendy gym. Which may be why the world was caught off-guard when publicist Kingsley announced that they had separated. When asked by "Us" weekly how long they had been apart, Kingsley said, "They just separated recently." Are they living apart? "I don't think so," she said. "I don't know." Is a divorce imminent? "All I know is what is in the statement," she replied. "I cannot speculate on anything else."

The rest of Hollywood was not feeling as restrained. Rumor No. 1 came fast on the heels of the statement: Hot gossip about a third party was about to break.

Rumors have always dogged Cruise and Kidman, and they have been vigilant - and litigious - in shooting them down. In July 1996, Cruise filed a $60 million defamation suit against the German magazine "Bunte" for speculating that he and Kidman had adopted their two children because he was sterile. (When two of the magazine's executives were killed in a plane crash, Cruise dropped the suit, settling for an apology, a printed retraction and payment of his attorney's fees.) In October 1998, the couple successfully sued London's "Express" on Sunday for suggesting that Cruise was gay and donated the money to charity. And in the spring of 1999, the husband and wife successfully sued the "Star" for alleging that they had required a therapist's coaching during the filming of "Eyes Wide Shut" to achieve sufficient onscreen sexual chemistry.

Last week, the rumor was that Cruise and Kidman had been broken up by Marcus Graham, the Australian actor Kidman was living with when she met Cruise. Nonsense, says Graham. "Marcus is shocked and saddened by the news," Graham's representative tells "Us" weekly on the actor's behalf. "Marcus and Nicole are just friends, and he hopes that she and Tom get back together again."

In fact, if you could forget the rumors for a moment, their marriage seemed quite strong. "We are committed, and I can't picture my life without him," Kidman once told columnist Liz Smith. A week before the Golden Globes, they had dinner at Il Ristorante Di Giorgio Baldi in Santa Monica, California, and talked quietly, looking like two people sharing a life.

Was that Christmas Eve rite really a last-ditch attempt to save a marriage? Did something unpleasant crop up suddenly early in February to force the announcement? "Something big must have happened," the source speculates. "You don't go through all of that and then eight weeks later decide to split."

The Fairy Tale Begins
Tom cruise first spotted Nicole Kidman in 1989, when he saw the red-haired Australian knockout - who has said she grew up feeling like "the ugliest person alive" - in the thriller "Dead Calm." Cruise decided Kidman was perfect to play his leading lady in "Days of Thunder," the movie about auto racing that he was preparing to shoot. He asked director Tony Scott to invite Kidman to a casting session in the fall of 1989. Even though both were involved in other relationships at the time - Kidman was going out with Graham, and Cruise was married to actor Mimi Rogers - sparks flew.

Cruise, however, was no playboy. Before Rogers, he had been romantically linked only to Rebecca De Mornay, his costar in 1983's "Risky Business." He met Rogers at a 1986 dinner party and was attracted to her strength. "I like bright, sexy women," he later said. "Someone strong enough to stand up to me." On May 9, 1987, Cruise and Rogers were married in a short Unitarian ceremony in a rented Victorian house in Bedford, New York. Rogers and Cruise were both children of divorce. He was born in Syracuse, New York, but his father, Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer, moved the family around Canada and the United States. When Cruise was 12, his mother, Mary Lee South, left Mapother and moved to Glen Ridge, New Jersey, with Cruise and his three sisters. The divorce had a profound effect on Cruise. "It was all very confusing," he has said. "It was frightening." It also made him the only boy in a house with four women. "Having grown up with women," Cruise has said, "I tend to trust and believe women much more easily than men."

Rogers - whose father, Phil Spickler, was an early Scientologist - was the one who turned Cruise on to the church, which he still belongs to, and which Kidman, who was raised a Catholic, became interested in later. Cruise has said that Scientology helped him focus and gain control over his life and overcome dyslexia. But even as they bonded over religion, Rogers and Cruise felt the pressure of being in a Hollywood marriage. "You cease to become a singular individual," Rogers said after their breakup. "You're never again mentioned without that name. And that's hard." On January 16, 1990, Cruise filed for divorce from Rogers.

Meanwhile, Kidman, the daughter of nurse-educator Janelle Kidman and psychologist-biochemist Antony Kidman, had joined Cruise on the Charlotte, North Carolina, set of "Thunder" in the fall of 1989, leaving boyfriend Graham behind in Australia. In Charlotte - and then in Daytona Beach, Florida, when the shoot moved there - Kidman and Cruise became friends. "Tom would pick me up in his car, and we'd go driving, listen to music and talk," Kidman later said of the time. "He took my breath away. I don't know what it was - chemical reaction? Hard to define, hard to resist."

Still, the couple kept themselves in check, or at least Kidman did. "I said, 'Out of bounds,' " she later recalled.

But after Cruise split from Rogers, the romance with Kidman took off. On one of their first dates, he took her sky diving. As the couple plummeted toward earth at 110 miles per hour, Cruise swooped in and gave Kidman a kiss on the lips. Soon his rented white BMW or his Harley-Davidson could be found parked outside Kidman's apartment. Cruise and Kidman went public with their relationship at the 1990 Academy Awards, arriving hand in hand. Said Kidman of her new beau: "I thought he was the sexiest man I'd ever seen in my life. So it started on lust."

Cruise got the parental thumbs up in the summer of 1990, when Kidman's mother came and stayed with the couple in New York for two weeks. "When she saw Tom and me together, she said that we were like two peas in a pod," Kidman recalled. "She said, 'You're two people who have always been looking for a best friend.' "

On Christmas Eve 1990, Cruise and Kidman were married in a civil ceremony in a huge rented house in Telluride, Colorado, standing beneath an indoor willow arbor laced with white lilies and red roses. The 5-foot-10 Kidman wore a white silk gown and a long train; the 5-foot-7 Cruise was in a black tuxedo. They wrote their own vows. Kidman's younger sister, Antonia Kidman, an entertainment reporter for a Sydney television station, stood as bridesmaid.

A Working Relationship
There's something ironic in a spokeswoman's mentioning Cruise and Kidman's "divergent careers" as the key factor in their separation, because while all three of the films they costarred in - "Days of Thunder" (1990), "Far and Away" (1992) and "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999) - were considered critical and box-office disappointments, the pair once relished sharing the screen.

Shortly before their wedding, Cruise demonstrated his belief in Kidman's ability by urging director Ron Howard to sign her as his costar in the Irish-immigrant epic "Far and Away." "Far's" producer Brian Grazer says that Howard was unaware that Cruise and Kidman were an item. "Will you read a newspaper?" Grazer says he told Howard. "They're a couple!" By the time the movie started shooting in Ireland and Montana, they were man and wife. "[It] was a real honeymoon period for them," said an Irish production manager. By all accounts, the pair were inseparable, racing horses together across the countryside and going bowling together to celebrate Cruise's twenty-ninth birthday at the film's Billings, Montana, set. Crew members joked that they were going to dump a bucket of water over the amorous newlyweds when they lingered too long over a kiss during rehearsal.

Far, however, was a colossal flop. Still, in 1996, the couple decided to work together again, traveling to England to film director Stanley Kubrick's sexual thriller, "Eyes Wide Shut." Both saw the chance to work with Kubrick - and each other - as the motivating factors. "There's a spontaneity, that's what I love about [Nicole's] acting," said Cruise. "She never holds back."

In "Eyes," Cruise and Kidman played a married couple in the throes of a crisis. Occasionally during filming, Kubrick would close the set in order to create an air of intimacy. "The sound guy would just mike us and leave," said Cruise. "There were things we did that were sexy for the two of us."

When Kubrick died in March 1999 during the final editing of "Eyes," his stars were devastated. "Stanley really understood Tom. And me," said Kidman. "He said that Tom was a roller coaster and I was a Thoroughbred."

Their Life Together
To hear them tell it, tom cruise and Nicole Kidman's marriage was one for the ages. "I hope that when I am 80 years old," Kidman said last September, "I'm sitting back and saying I have two great kids and I am still married to the man that I fell in love with when I was 22."

Though they didn't make the scene as much as many other stars, when they were out in public, they weren't bashful about their affection for each other. As recently as last November, Cruise and Kidman accompanied friends Russell Crowe and record executive Tommy Mottola to Float, a New York nightclub, where the couple cavorted in the VIP room until 2:30 a.m. "Nicole was doing a sexy dance for Tom," a cocktail waitress at the club tells "Us" weekly, "while he leaned against a wall, watching and enjoying the show."

Three years into their marriage, Cruise and Kidman - who thought about having children "pretty much from the moment we saw each other," Kidman has said - adopted a daughter, Isabella, now 8 years old, and two years after that a son, Connor, now 6. They have successfully kept their children out of the limelight, and neither has seen Cruise's or Kidman's films. "Tom and I are fierce about protecting them," said Kidman, "and that is really hard at times."

Those close to the pair vouch for their parenting skills. "Tom is such a good dad," Antonia Kidman said in July 1999. "So involved, so much enthusiasm." And Vinessa Shaw, who appeared with them in "Eyes Wide Shut," thought the couple would have more children in the future. "Tom and Nic are very family-spirited," she said. "The more, the merrier."

But Cruise and Kidman were frank about the effect that children can have on the husband-wife relationship: "For a while, you've got to battle becoming absolutely obsessed with your child, shutting out everything else," Kidman said. "I remember Tom coming to me and saying 'What about me? What about our bond?' You've got to find a way to somehow take care of your baby and your husband."

The movie stars seemed to find a balance, though, vowing never to spend more than three weeks apart at a time. "Tom and I move around a lot," said Kidman. "But we sit down every night together to have dinner. And on Sundays, we always have a big dinner with extended family." Kidman learned to make her own croissants, and Cruise whipped up big pasta meals. Cruise was the more organized of the two: "He would make sure I had the nappies [diapers] when I was taking the kids out, and the bottles," Kidman said. If the conflict became too great, both seemed willing to give up their careers to be full-time parents. "I would turn down an Oscar to see my boy at a baseball game or my girl at a song recital," Cruise said.

It was also a challenge being from two different cultures - the all-American hunk and the siren from down under. "So much of who you are is where you grew up, and you want that to still be a part of your life," Kidman said. "So the question is, Where do you live?" The couple, who often referred to themselves as "gypsies," stayed happy by moving among their homes in Pacific Palisades, California, New York and, most recently, Sydney, Australia.

Kidman even doled out marriage tips. "You have to keep going back to the simple things," she advised in July 1999. "Just holding hands, walking down the street. Or spooning, if you're lying in bed. Spooning can make you feel very contented."

Last New Year's Eve, though, the pair were in Las Vegas, and they had excitement on their minds. They rode the Stratosphere's Big Shot, which shoots 160 feet in the air, yelling "One more time!" like children. Now, less than six weeks later, so much has changed. The ride is over. The highest-flying couple in Hollywood have come down to earth.

JD HEYMAN, BEN PAPAS, SARAH SAFFLAN, RUSSELL SCOTT SMITH
US Weekly 314-315