This week, it was announced Hollywood offspring royalty Bella Cruise was launching a clothing line.
As a standalone fact, the world was unperturbed. Until, of course, it was revealed exactly what the name of the line would be: Bella Kidman Cruise.
Cruise, a 25-year-old artist who is the daughter of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, has been known publicly, for the better part of her whole life, as Bella Cruise.
Though little has been confirmed since the Cruise/Kidman split, much speculation centred on the inability for Kidman to stay close to her children because of the Church of Scientology. It was reported that differences in religious beliefs caused a rift between the actress and her two children.
Listen: From Charlize Theron in Monster, to Nicole Kidman in The Hours, why do women have to ‘go ugly’ to win an Oscar? Post continues after audio.
Of course, Tom Cruise is the Church’s most famous member, with his children staying within the church following the break down of their parents’ marriage in 2001. It’s widely believed that since then, the Church, Tom and their children viewed their mother as a “suppressive person”, meaning she can and should be shunned by members of the church.
In fact, former scientologist Leah Remini wrote her 2015 book Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology, that she once asked Bella if she saw much of her mother.
“Not if I have a choice. Our mum is a f**king SP [suppressive person],” she reportedly said, according to Remini.
Kidman was not invited to Bella’s 2015 wedding (though, neither was Cruise) and, according to Mail Online, the two have not been pictured together since 2006.
Speaking in London in 2015 at the Women In The World conference, Kidman hinted her divorce from Cruise led to a supremely lonely period of her life.
“Out of my divorce came work that was applauded,” she said. “That culminated in winning an Oscar and that caused an epiphany, which was: ‘This isn’t the answer.’ I was holding a gold statue and I was the loneliest I’d ever been,” she says of her 2003 Oscar win.
In 2016, Bella was asked by New Idea if she still speaks to her parents, to which she replied: “Of course we talk, they’re my parents”, adding, anyone who says otherwise is “full of s**t”.
Curiously, a year later, when Kidman was accepting her Golden Globe for her role in Big Little Lies, she thanked her children. Well, her two children with husband Keith Urban. It sparked a very public online conversation about the nature of her relationship with Bella and her brother Connor.
And now, in 2018, Bella Cruise’s clothing line has been dubbed Bella Kidman Cruise. Perhaps it’s the first hint that in fact, all may actually be well in the worlds of Kidman and Cruise.
That despite our incessant (and probably unnecessary speculation), they’re doing just fine, thanks.