The Tragic Real-Life Story Of Keith Urban
The following article mentions addiction struggles and child abuse.
Country music superstar Keith Urban burst on the scene in the late 1990s with the release of his self-titled American debut album. Since then, the Australian singer and guitarist has charted numerous No. 1 singles, even making history by racking up more consecutive top 10 hits on Billboard's country airplay chart than any other artist. Urban is also no stranger to television viewers, having spent several seasons critiquing wannabe vocalists on "American Idol," sitting at the judges table along such fellow music-biz luminaries as Jennifer Lopez, Nicki Minaj, and Mariah Carey.
His personal life has also been widely reported in the media, chiefly due to his marriage to Oscar-winning actor Nicole Kidman, whom he wed in 2006.
From the outside looking in, fans see a happily married music star. Urban's life is without question lavish, and his career is beyond impressive. Yet there's more to his journey than achievement and acclaim; he's also experienced some truly rough times along the way, emerging with the inner strength that tends to characterize those who've survived struggles. To find out more about this side of his life, read on to explore the tragic real-life story of Keith Urban.
Keith Urban grew up in poverty
Keith Urbahn (he dropped the "h" when he became a professional entertainer) was born in New Zealand in October 1967, and his family relocated to Australia when he was just a toddler. As the Daily Mail noted, his parents eventually settled in Brisbane, where they ran a small corner store. For a time, the family lived in a home situated behind the shop.
Long before Keith Urban transformed into a world-renowned superstar, he lived a humble life. Interviewed by Glamour, Urban's wife, Nicole Kidman, discussed her own hardscrabble background. "I've always been aware of privilege because both my parents came from nothing," she said, revealing that her husband grew up in similarly poverty-stricken circumstances. "I also married a man who's totally self-made and came from a background where he said every brick in his house is a gig," she told the magazine. "He grew up on a farm, literally in a shed. They didn't have bedrooms. Four of them lived in a shed."
According to Kidman, Urban and his family relied on friends to get by. "They have talked of a community that came and helped their family because they had nothing," she said.
His father struggled with alcoholism
Poverty wasn't the only obstacle that Keith Urban had to overcome from his difficult childhood. "My dad was an alcoholic, and I grew up in an alcoholic's house," Keith said of his father, Robert Urban, in a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone. As Keith recalled, his father's issues with drinking had a huge impact on their relationship when he was growing up. "No intimacy," he explained.
Looking back at his childhood, Keith remembered his father doling out discipline with corporal punishment. "My recollection is that he was a physical disciplinarian," he said. While Keith initially took that in stride, since becoming a father himself he's come to realize the severity of punishing one's children with violence. "Ten years ago, I would have said, 'He never did anything I didn't deserve.' Now I realize it's not about deserving it," Keith mused. When he tried to broach the subject with his dad, as a grown man, Keith said that his father couldn't remember ever striking him. "I don't think he was in denial, he genuinely had no recollection. 'Hitting you? I never did that!'" Keith shared.
Keith also remembered experiencing little in the way of affection from his father. "I don't recall him ever telling me he loved me as a kid," the musician said.
His family's house burned to the ground
While describing Keith Urban's impoverished childhood to Glamour, the musician's wife, Oscar-winning actor Nicole Kidman, dropped another tragic tidbit of information about his youth: when he was a kid, his family's house burned down.
Urban reflected on this in 2016, while accepting the Artist Humanitarian Award from the Country Radio Broadcasters. In his acceptance speech, Urban recalled that he was just nine years old at the time. "We were all okay, but we lost all our belongings, which wasn't much, but it was everything we had," Urban recalled, as reported by People. Salvation, however, arrived in the form of a country music club that his parents had joined, whose members pitched in to help out. "And without hesitation, our country music club immediately put on a fundraiser for us," Urban added.
That experience molded Urban, and contributed to his tendency toward philanthropy after he became a successful country star. In fact, he noted, whenever he's asked to explain or define what country music is, he finds himself being taken right back to that act of generosity. "There's always so many answers to that," he said, "but the one thing I really believe to be true, no matter where you come from, is it's about community."
Early in his career, he allegedly spent a lot of money on drugs
Like his father, Keith Urban also experienced issues with substance abuse. As Urban explained in his 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, that became increasingly problematic once he moved to Nashville in the early 1990s. His drug usage took a turn when a roommate asked if he wanted to freebase cocaine. "And then one day he offered me this massive pipe," Urban told the magazine. "I'd never had it, it looked good, so I took it. Things didn't immediately go pear-shaped, but that was the beginning of it."
As Urban encountered early frustrations while trying to launch his career in the country music capital of the world, that only served to fuel his use of drugs and alcohol. "I stepped up my drinking. I started doing more drugs," Urban said. "The whole back end of the '90s were just awful."
How awful? According to Urban's one-time songwriting partner, Vernon Rust, his use of cocaine escalated to a truly shocking degree. In Rust's tell-all book, "Fake News," he wrote about using cocaine with Urban on numerous occasions. "We lived in the studio. We did a lot of coke and ... stayed up for days," he claimed, as excerpted by RadarOnline. In fact, Rust alleged that Urban once snorted more than $320,000 worth of cocaine in what he described as an "epic binge."
He went to rehab to address his issues with substance abuse
By the late 1990s, Keith Urban couldn't ignore the degree to which drugs and alcohol were ruling his life. "When I was onstage, I felt good, but if I was not onstage, I was very, very insecure," he told Rolling Stone. "I felt like I didn't have much of anything to offer. I was just an alien." In order to recapture the feeling he had while onstage when he wasn't performing, he turned to cocaine and Ecstasy. "They were my thing," he said of his drugs of choice. "I loved them." Eventually, the substances that once made him feel good only served to make him feel worse. Recognizing that he needed to make a change, he made the difficult decision to seek help; in 1998, he checked himself into rehab and got sober.
Speaking with The Times, Urban insisted he doesn't have any problem with other people enjoying whatever they want to enjoy, but has come to the understanding that he simply cannot. "I just realized I'm allergic to it," he said, jokingly adding, "Someone said, 'You have an allergy? What happens when you drink?' And I said, 'I break out in cuffs.'" Ultimately, he explained, "I had to find a different way to be in the world."
Before meeting Nicole Kidman, he struggled with opening up
Keith Urban met future wife Nicole Kidman in 2005, at a Los Angeles gala paying tribute to accomplished Australians. After dating for a year, Kidman and Urban got married in June 2006, with the nuptials held in Sydney, Australia.
While the marriage has been long-lasting and seemingly happy, Urban has admitted that he had a difficult time connecting with others. That, he explained in an interview with Variety, had to do with the way he was raised, particularly due to the somewhat distant relationship he had with his father. Discussing his single "Say Something," Urban said, "I pivoted it to be more personal about the way I was raised and the fact that there's times I wish I said sorry to somebody before they drifted out of my life or 'I love you' to someone who passed away, and I never got the chance."
He credited his relationship with Kidman for being able to better communicate his feelings to his loved ones. "It took marrying Nic to learn all about that, learn about how to really communicate properly and speak and say things," Urban said, explaining that while he could write convincing love songs, he really wasn't that knowledgeable about what he was writing. He also expressed his gratitude that his daughters wouldn't face those struggles. "I'm glad that our girls are in a very different environment where we talk about things all the time," he added.
He went to rehab a second time after relapsing
In 2006, just a few months after marrying Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban suffered a relapse. While he never disclosed precisely what that entailed, it was serious enough that he checked himself into the Betty Ford Centre. "One can never let one's guard down on recovery, and I'm afraid that I have," he said in a statement, as reported by CBC News. He eventually exited the facility after three months of treatment, in January 2007.
He subsequently revealed why he chose to spend an extended amount of time in rehab. "Learning about abstinence was one thing, but then there was all this other area of my life to start learning about, and so 30 days became 60, and 60 days became 90, and with each week that passed I found myself really learning how to surrender," he wrote in a now-deleted message he posted on his website, via People. Given that he was a newlywed, just months into his marriage, with a new album to promote, he conceded that the timing wasn't great.
However, he subsequently revealed in a chat with Andrew Denton's "Interview" that it was Kidman who orchestrated his return to rehab. "My wife put an intervention together and it was ... it was divine," he said. "I mean, 'divine intervention,' but it's true, it really was. It was love in action and the timing was absolutely divine."
His longtime production manager died in a tragic accident during a show
Keith Urban's live performances are characterized by high energy and good times. Sadly, a 2021 show in Ohio's Put-In Bay turned tragic when Urban's longtime tour production manager, Randy "Baja" Fletcher, suffered a fatal accident prior to the start of the performance. According to the Port Clinton News Herald, Fletcher fell off the stage and suffered critical injuries; he was airlifted to a nearby hospital, but died the following day. He was 72 years old.
Following Fletcher's death, Urban issued a statement in tribute. "Some people ask, 'Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty kinda person," Urban wrote, reported Australia's New Idea. "Baja's view was, 'What a beautiful glass.' "I loved him. We all loved him — and I'm grateful he chose us as his road family for 10 years."
Fletcher was something of a legend around the music community, having worked on tours for the likes of Waylon Jennings, Brooks & Dunn, Randy Travis, and ZZ Top, with the latter's guitarist and frontman, Billy Gibbons, offering a tribute to Billboard. "Baja, as we all know, drove the Cadillac as few others could do," Gibbons wrote. "One of our first and foremost way back when who went on to show how it's done."
He was hounded by the paparazzi to the point that he crashed his motorcycle
Celebrities are often chased by paparazzi photographers, and those pursuits can sometimes become fraught. They can also go horribly awry, as was the case with the fatal accident that took the life of Princess Diana. Keith Urban has certainly had his issues with paparazzi, and he's also experienced some frightening and potentially life-threatening situations because of them. That was the case in October 2007 when Urban was driving his motorcycle to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in Sydney, Australia. As Reuters reported, a photographer followed him, also riding a motorcycle. As Urban was being chased, he got into an accident while trying to avoid hitting an oncoming vehicle.
"While out riding to an AA meeting, a time when my privacy is especially important to me, I felt myself being pursued," Urban in a statement, reported People. "I sped up and in an effort to elude an oncoming car, which was making an illegal U-turn, saw no choice but to drop my bike."
However, Urban was also quick to give credit to the pursuing paparazzo for coming to his aid after the accident. "In actual fact, my pursuer came to my assistance, without taking photos, and helped me from the road," Urban added in his statement. "I returned home, got my car and continued on my way." Urban was thankfully uninjured after the incident, but was reportedly seen visibly shaking.
He rushed to the side of wife Nicole Kidman after her father's unexpected death
Keith Urban was driving to a Los Angeles-area charity gala in September 2014, where he was scheduled to perform, when he received some terrible news: his father-in-law, Dr. Antony Kidman, had died in his Singapore hotel room — where he was visiting his wife's sister — after suffering a fall. Urban immediately canceled, turning his car around and headed to the airport, taking a private jet to Nashville in order to be with wife Nicole Kidman during her time of grief.
He subsequently issued a statement of apology for his 11th hour cancellation. "I'm so very sorry that I cannot perform this weekend," he wrote in a Facebook post. " We are in a deep state of grief at the passing of Nic's Father and are heading to Australia to be with family," he continued. "We want to thank everyone from the bottom of our hearts for their love, prayers and support through this devastating loss."
A few weeks later, Nicole appeared on NBC's "Today," and spoke with interviewer Maria Shriver about her father's unexpected death. "I lost my father, which is a devastating thing for my family and myself right now," she said, crediting both her faith and her tight relationship with Urban for helping pull her through such a difficult time. "I'm lucky to have a rock of a husband and a strong faith," she said. "I have both those things."
His father died of cancer
Keith Urban has certainly had issues with his father, but their relationship wasn't all bad. It was his dad, Robert Urban, whom he credited with introducing him to country music when he was just a kid, and to exposing him to the various musical influences that wound up shaping him as an artist.
In late 2015, Keith dropped by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum to check out an exhibit devoted to him. While being interviewed about the exhibit, he revealed that his father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and was in hospice care. "He's probably only got a few weeks, if that," Keith told The Tennessean. "I've just been dealing with that the last couple of days. This has all come at a very strange time where it's typical of a career that has extreme highs and extreme lows all often at the exact same time," he added. Keith also admitted that having an exhibit in his honor was "bittersweet" under the circumstances, given the role that his father played in encouraging him to leave Australia and follow his dreams in Nashville. "My dad is the catalyst for me living in America," he said.
Keith's estimate was, tragically, far too optimistic. Just a few days later, Keith announced that Robert had died. "His long battle with cancer is now over and he is finally at peace," Keith said in a statement to Us Weekly.
The bittersweet reason he makes himself cry regularly
Keith Urban is unabashed about his tendency to cry regularly. In fact, he told Rolling Stone back in 2016, he actually encourages himself to do it — more for his mental health than anything else. "When I haven't cried in a while, I can tell I get pent-up," he said. "Then maybe once a month I have a good cry, one big avalanche of a torrential downpour, and I feel amazing for weeks afterward. The streets are cleaned, the skies are blue, there's no humidity and it's beautiful."
According to Urban, it doesn't take a whole lot to make him break into tears. As he explained in an interview with Andrew Denton's "Interview," his emotions continue to accumulate over things big and small; eventually he reaches a point at which he simply can't hold them back anymore, and the dam literally bursts. "I mean, little things, the passing of time, kids growing up, the loss of friends, loved ones for all manner of reasons — all of it," Urban explained.
If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues or may be the victim of child abuse, contact the relevant resources below:
- The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
- If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.