Nicole Kidman admitted that when she won an Oscar, she couldn't really enjoy it because of the "emptiness" she felt following her divorce from Tom Cruise. The couple were married for 11 years.

Kidman won the Best Actress Oscar for "The Hours" in 2003, but she was still getting over her divorce from Cruise, which was finalized in August 2001.

She told Harper's Bazaar Australia's December issue that winning the prestigious award "can show you the emptiness of your own life, which is kind of what it showed me."

"I was having professional success and my personal life was struggling," she adds.

But she realized she needed to pick herself back up when she played suicidal author Virginia Woolf in "The Hours."

"Walking into the river with those stones in my pockets -- I chose life," she told the magazine of filming one particular scene. "At the time, I was at a low point, and by playing her, it put me into a place of appreciating life."