SHE is the daughter of a privileged Sydney family who became an Oscar-winning actress. He is a New Zealand farmer’s son who busked to live in Nashville and battled cocaine addiction before rising to country music stardom.

Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban opted for a traditional Roman Catholic wedding ceremony on a clear Sydney winter evening yesterday. It may have been lavish but, compared with the hysteria that surrounded Kidman’s previous relationship, with Tom Cruise, it was positively low key. That marriage was performed by the Church of Scientology, to which Cruise still belongs, and thus it was not recognised by the Catholic Church.

Father Paul Coleman, who married the couple and who was about the only person associated with the wedding who was prepared to give interviews, said: “For Nicole, this is a spiritual homecoming, to the Church and her faith.”

Kidman, 39, was 15 minutes late for her 5pm wedding at the Cardinal Cerretti Chapel, which has views across the Pacific Ocean. She wore an ivory gown, designed by Nicolas Ghesquière for Balenciaga, and a veil. She arrived in a white 1948 Rolls Royce, lowered the window and thanked some of the 1,000 people outside to greet her.

Urban, 38, came by bus with other guests from a hotel. At 6.25pm the chapel’s bells tolled for five minutes to indicate that they had been married in the candle-lit ceremony.

Kidman’s sister, Antonia, was maid of honour and her daughter, Isabella, 13 — one of two children Kidman adopted with Cruise — was bridesmaid.

Shane, Urban’s brother, was the best man and Marlon Holden, a long-time friend who produced Urban’s first solo country album in 1991, was also with the groom. The 250 guests included Neil Finn, the rock singer, Russell Crowe, the actor, and Rupert Murdoch, chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, parent company of The Times. Hugh Jackman, the Australian Hollywood star, later sang the Australian ballad Tenterfield Saddler, the story of a performer’s rise from humble beginnings in a small town.

One guest later told the US-based People magazine: “Nicole cried all the way to the church in the car and then she cried all during the ceremony and had to wipe her eyes under the veil.

“It was the most emotional and beautiful ceremony. Nicole looked ethereal with her veil floating, like a vision in white . . . Keith cried when he looked at her. When her veil was lifted, Keith moved right in and he grabbed her and kissed her. It was a long, passionate kiss.

“Then everything went from being quiet and elegant and intense to really loud, like we were suddenly at a soccer game. There was screaming and hollering and such excitement.”

Father Coleman, a Jesuit, indicated before the wedding ceremony that he would talk of the need for couples to maintain their love, saying: “Make time for each other, do romantic things together, and never part without kissing.”

Kidman walked down the aisle on the arm of her father, Dr Antony Kidman, a leading Sydney psychiatrist. Urban’s parents, who moved from New Zealand to Australia when their son was a toddler, farm cows and pigs on a small Queensland property. Keith, their eldest son, took on his father’s love of country music and moved to the US in 1992 after winning the Star Maker contest at Australia’s largest country music festival. His career died and Urban went through cocaine addiction, busking for couples marrying on Dolly Parton’s estate.

By late 1998 — the year in which Kidman and Tom Cruise made Eyes Wide Shut, their last film together — Urban was checking himself into a Nashville treatment centre. He would come out to find God, make a string of top-selling albums and be introduced to Kidman at a Los Angeles ball early last year by Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister.