Keith Urban’s Wife Nicole Kidman Mourns Loss of Mother

Photo byShutterstock

Keith Urban‘s wife, Nicole Kidman, is mourning the unexpected loss of her mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, who was 84 years old when she passed away. The Big Little Lies star was in Venice for the Venice Film Festival, where she was awarded Best Actress for her role in Babygirl, but left due to the loss of the family matriarch.

“Today I arrived in Venice to learn shortly thereafter that my beautiful, brave mother, Janelle Ann Kidman, has just passed,” the film’s director, Halina Reijn, read in a statement (per Vanity Fair). “I’m in shock and I have to go to my family, but this award is for her. She shaped me, she guided me, and she made me. I’m beyond grateful that I get to say her name to all of you through Halina. The collision of art and life is heartbreaking, and my heart is broken.”

It was Kidman’s mother who was her inspiration for much of both her professional and personal life, and raised her, and her sister, to celebrate the arts.

“She’s given me the fire to pursue the career I have because I’ve always wanted to please her,” Kidman previously told The Sydney Morning Herald (via The Hollywood Reporter). “But she also carved her own path and wanted her daughters to have the same opportunity to carve their own paths.”

“Mum didn’t necessarily get the career that she wanted, but she was determined that her daughters would have opportunities that were equal,” she added. “That’s given me my life. And she gave me my life, she and my dad.”

It is undoubtedly Kidman’s own mother that inspired her to be the mother she is to the two daughters, Sunday Rose and Faith Margaret, whom she shares with Urban.

“She’s an extraordinary mum, she really, really is,” Urban says of his wife, whom he wed in 2006. “Those girls are very, very lucky, and I feel very lucky that the children I should have in this world happen to be with Nic. I don’t know anything about raising kids and Nic does, and that comes in extremely — it’s really made for an experience I wouldn’t have had without that. Her patience, her recognizing them as people and not just little kids is really extraordinary. Her attention to honoring their feelings and listening to them right from day one – really being attentive to that is not how I was raised at all, so it’s really beautiful to see.”

Funeral services have yet to be announced. The news comes as Urban is less than a month away from kicking off his HIGH residency in Las Vegas on October 4.

Everything Nash extends our deepest condolences to Kidman and her family.