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Nicole Kidman has revealed she was warned that marrying her first husband Tom Cruise could have a deleterious impact on her career.

She was 23 when she exchanged vows with Cruise in 1990, the year she achieved her Hollywood breakthrough acting alongside him in Days of Thunder.

At that point, he was 28 and already one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world, having led the cast of such pictures as Top Gun, Risky Business, Born on the Fourth of July, The Color of Money and Rain Man.

Kidman, 59, was told her own professional life would be eclipsed by her association with a celebrity who was so much more famous than she was.

'I’m like: "I don’t care. I’m in love. I want to be married." And then I was his "wife" and they were like: "See, we told you,"' she told British Vogue.

'I’m 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,"' the Oscar-winning actress shared.

Nicole Kidman has revealed she was warned that marrying her first husband Tom Cruise could have a deleterious impact on her career

Kidman and Cruise adopted two children called Bella, 33, and Connor, 31, over the course of their more than decade-long marriage before they separated in 2001.

Cruise was Kidman's first husband, but had himself been previously married to The Mirror Has Two Faces actress Mimi Rogers, who introduced him to Scientology.

After her divorce from Cruise, Rogers memorably joked to Playboy that 'he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument.'

Kidman has now offered her own rare insights into her failed marriage to Cruise, saying with an incredulous whistle: 'Yeah, I got married so young. Suddenly I was 22, 23 years old and I had this huge movie star husband.'

The Moulin Rouge! star insisted that 'it just seemed completely natural,' adding that she and Cruise 'just fell madly in love and it was that simple,' although she recalled 'people saying to me: "OK, well this is really going to affect your career."'

Cruise and Kidman became one of the most high-octane Hollywood power couples of the 1990s, the instant center of attention on any red carpet they attended.

Onscreen, they co-starred in Ron Howard's 1992 western Far and Away and Stanley Kubrick's swan song, the 1999 erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut.

Upon their divorce, Connor and Bella reportedly stayed with their father and, like him, remained in the Church of Scientology, to which Kidman does not belong.

They have rarely been seen with their mother since, although when Kidman married her subsequent husband Keith Urban in the Sydney suburbs in 2006, Bella served as one of her bridesmaids and Connor acted as an usher.

In 2018, Kidman remarked that she was 'very private about' her equation with her two older children, while speaking to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

'They are adults. They are able to make their own decisions. They have made choices to be Scientologists and as a mother, it’s my job to love them.'

At that time, Bella was said to be living in London with her husband, IT consultant Max Parker, while Connor was supposedly a resident of Clearwater, Florida near his father's penthouse and the global headquarters of the Church of Scientology.

Neither of Bella's parents was reportedly present at her wedding in 2015, although Cruise was said to have bankrolled the ceremony.