1. Isabella Jane
Nicole welcomed her adopted firstborn, Isabella, with then husband Tom Cruise in 1992, when she was only 25.
“From the minute Tom and I were married, I wanted to have babies. And we lost a baby early on, so that was really very traumatic. And that’s when we would adopt Bella,” Kidman told Vanity Fair in 2007 of having adopted kids, saying she celebrated her 40th birthday by taking Bella to get blue hair.
Bella lives in London and after leaning towards a beauty career, graduating from West London’s Delmar Academy of Make-up and Hair, she is now a fashion designer, launching her own T-shirt line, Bella Kidman Cruise. "It's very exciting," Nicole said of Bella's line. "I think it's such a great way to express and Bella is a beautiful drawer as well, she's always been able to draw."
Design has long been an interest: when her father was married to Katie Holmes, Bella worked for her on her clothing line Holmes and Yang.
After previously dating indie musician Eddie Frencher, she married IT consultant Max Parker in 2015 at an intimate ceremony at the Dorchester Hotel and while neither of her parents or her brother attended the wedding, as Bella wanted to avoid media attention, a source at the time said Nicole was "very happy for Bella," and that Tom helped pay for the celebration.
2. Connor Anthony
Nicole's only son, Connor, was born on Jan. 17, 1995. He was also adopted.
“I got married really fast and really young,” Kidman, who was 22 when she met Tom Cruise, told WHO in 2012. “But I don’t regret that because it got me Bella and Connor and I did have a fantastic marriage for a long period.”
Connor is now based in Clearwater, Florida, near his father's penthouse apartment and the headquarters of the Church of Scientology and has worked as a DJ and an actor.
“Music, it’s where my head is at … You know music is cool because you can never stop creating. You are always doing something new, so I’m willing to go wherever the music takes me," Connor told People magazine in 2016.
In 2013, he released dance track "Closer to Heaven" and he has acted in 2008's Seven Pounds and 2012's Red Dawn.
Now, “Connor has a pretty simple life in Clearwater. He lives in his own home in a Scientology community. His life is deep-sea fishing. He has a lot of friends and seems very well-liked,” a recent PEOPLE article reports a source as saying. Connor posts his catches of the day on his Instagram, TheConnorCruise.
As for his relationship with his mother, he told Women's Day in 2014, "I love my mum. I don't care what people say, I know that me and Mum are solid. I love her a lot."
Whether or not her two older children have ever tried to contact their birth parents, Nicole, who had an adopted aunt and played a mother of an adoptee in Lion, which she called “a love letter to my children,” is not opposed to them trying.
“It’s very much a part of the whole relationship, so it needs to be addressed [and] discussed,” she says in The Jess Cagle Interview. “I don’t know about other people’s lives, [but] as parents of adopted children, the advice [we were given] was, ‘If they want to find their birth parents, you support that.’"
Although Isabella and Connor's adherence to their father's religion of Scientology is said to have distanced them from their Catholic mother, she accepts their choices.
“I’m very private about all that. I have to protect all those relationships. I know 150% that I would give up my life for my children because it’s what my purpose is,” Kidman is reported as saying by WHO Magazine.
"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.”
And she is proud of them.
“They are generous, kind and hardworking. And these are traits that I love to see in my children,” Nicole told Women's Weekly magazine of Bella and Connor.
3. Sunday Rose
Two years after her 2006 wedding to country singer Keith Urban, Nicole Kidman gave birth to her second daughter on July 7, 2008. Nicole's dad, Antony, suggested she was named after Australian arts patron Sunday Reed. But Nicole gave a different explanation for the name of the first of her biological children to Hello in 2010.
“When we were both alone, before we met each other, Sunday was the day we dreaded most, because when you don't have someone in your life Sundays can be really lonely,” she said.
“Then when we met, we went from dreading Sunday to really loving it. It was the day when nobody was going to bother you, you could stay in bed, you could do what you wanted to do. We just thought, What a great name for our baby!”
“At 41, it’s more of a painful love,” Nicole told Elle magazine of having children later in life. “I look at that little girl and I’m like, ‘Oh, no, what’s going to happen?’ It’s almost like my heart is stretching; I’m feeling all the muscles stretch with emotion. It’s a beautiful love, but there’s a lot of fear and pain for her life, and for Bella and Connor’s life.”
Nicole, who has been open about her fertility issues, has said she conceived during the filming of the movie Australia with Hugh Jackman, after taking a dip in a magical lake. 'There is something up there in the Kununurra water because we all went swimming in the waterfalls, so we can call it the fertility waters now.'
Sunday, who loves to sing and dance, had her 10th birthday marked by a posting on her mother's instagram.
4. Faith Margaret
Nicole's third daughter, Faith, was born on Dec. 28 in 2010. Like Sunday, Faith is the biological child of Nicole and Keith. Unlike Sunday, she was carried to term via a gestational carrier.
Speaking to 60 Minutes in 2011, Nicole said she has “had a roller coaster ride with fertility.”
“Anyone that’s been in the place of wanting another child or wanting a child knows the disappointment, the pain and the loss that you go through trying and struggling ... Fertility is such a big thing, and it’s not something I’ve ever run away from talking about.”
Together with Keith, “We were in a place of desperately wanting another child,” Nicole says of going with a surrogate to have Faith. “This opportunity arose for us, and I couldn’t get pregnant.”
As for her child's name, well that was an obvious choice: “They never gave up faith they’d have another child together,” a friend of Keith and Nicole's says. “They feel blessed.”
While it may seem that Nicole is closer with her two younger children than Bella and Connor—she received criticism for not mentioning them in her award-acceptance speeches for Big Little Lies—the actress says that is more a product of their age and distance.
"They live with Tom, which was their choice," Kidman told Hello! magazine in 2010. "I'd love them to live with us, but what can you do?"
“I have four children, so to stay in touch with them is very important,” she told DuJour.
"If it were the choice between my family and Keith, and my career, I wouldn’t even bat an eyelid," she said to the Weekly. "The most important things to me are the love of our relationship and my children.
"At this stage of my life, and with time being so precious, the joy I get from us as a family outweighs any joy in any other area of my life, by far."
Like their close friend Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman and Debora-Lee Furness, seen below visiting Nicole after she welcomed Sunday in 2008, have made a family through adoption: they have a daughter Ava and a son Oscar.
