It’s no secret that alcohol and drugs are apart of the Hollywood lifestyle, but for many the lifestyle can get out of hand, fast, and without an intervention it can have deadly consequences.
Keith Urban struggled with an addiction to alcohol and cocaine and he credits his wife Nicole Kidman with helping to get his life back on track not just once, but multiple times.
Urban, 54, grew up with an alcoholic father, which made him more susceptible to have a problem with alcohol.
“My dad was an alcoholic, so I grew up in an alcoholic house and it took me a long time to believe I was wired the same,” he told the Sunday Times.
The country superstar went into rehab for the first time in 1998.
He would return to rehab less than 10 years later after his drinking became an issue while on tour in 2006.
“Everyone does what they want to do to have a great time. I just realized I’m allergic to it. Someone said, ‘You have an allergy? What happens when you drink?’ And I said, ‘I break out in cuffs,’” he said.
Even though Kidman and Urban had met just a year prior, and they were still newlyweds, Kidman stuck with Urban and helped him get better.
“I was very, very blessed to have Nic call an intervention on me,” Urban said, according to the DailyMail, adding he could have “caused the implosion of my fresh marriage.”
At the time Urban was in trouble, Kidman was away filming a movie. She flew home, gathered their friends together, and staged an intervention.
“In many ways, it was the most powerful act of love to step into the fire and pull me out, because she believed in me, and she saw something in me in such a way that she risked everything, everything, to trust me and pull me out of the fire and allow me then to do the right thing and come out into the light,” he said.
He checked into the Betty Ford Center in California in October 2006, and in January 2007 he announced he had completed his treatment.
He wrote his ballad “Thank You” to express his gratitude for Kidman.
In 2018, Urban admitted he wished he got sober earlier, but “it is what it is.”
“I knew I wasn’t at my full potential, and that’s what was starting to get to me. I was enslaved… I was living a very, very small life.”