Actress Nicole Kidman has opened up about the difficult time she had after her divorce from actor Tom Cruise in 2001.

During a sit-down at the Women in the World Summit here on Thursday, the Australian actress admitted that she tried to "get lost" in her movie characters to overcome the reality of life following her divorce, reports aceshowbiz.com.

After her's divorce from Cruise, the actress received a lot of praise for her roles in movies including "Moulin Rouge!" and "The Hours ".

Of whether or not her divorce unleashed her creativity, she said: "I was running from my life at that time. I wasn't able to handle the reality of my life."

"As an actor, you have this wonderful thing where you can go and get lost in somebody else's life and become somebody else for a period of time," the Oscar-winning actress said.

"And when I look back on it, I really see that. Out of that came work that sort of was applauded and so that was an interesting thing for me."

She also recalled the years when she worked hard to restore normalcy in her life.

"I then sort of embraced my own life and I got myself together and it took me a number of years and during that time, I worked a lot. The work was a great place for me to exist and then that culminated in winning an Oscar," she said.

After winning the Oscar, Nicole admitted that she had an "epiphany".

"That caused an epiphany which was (I thought) 'actually this is not the answer'. I was sitting in the Beverly Hills hotel and it was all extraordinary and I was the loneliest I've ever been," she said.

The 48-year-old actress then revealed that the Oscar couldn't heal the wound in her heart.

"And that was a very strange thing to have happened and it was a fantastic thing to have happened because I was jolted out of this, I suppose, need or desire to say, 'This is gonna heal me' and it didn't. And then I went, 'I need to really hone in on what I want as a woman and for my life.'"