Celebrity breakups either landed with a thud or barely whispered in 2025.
There were the splits no one saw coming such as Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, long treated as the gold standard of functional celebrity marriage. Cat Deeley and Patrick Kielty followed, ending a relationship that had always felt solid and immune to spectacle.
Then there were the breakups delivered as art. Lily Allen’s West End Girl, a record that did the talking for her. Lyrics, timelines and third parties became the story and the album itself doubled as an explanation, accusation and coping mechanism. Elsewhere, splits such as Rami Malek and Emma Corrin unfolded with almost deliberate understatement.
Taken together, the celebrity splits of 2025 weren’t about mess or melodrama. They were about contrast, loud versus quiet, public versus elliptical and the growing sense that in the age of oversharing, the most interesting breakup move might be choosing how to leave.
So, here are the celebrity relationships whose endings have shaped the cultural conversation:
Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban
Aussie actor Nicole Kidman and her rocker husband Keith Urban split after a stonking 19 year romance that began when they met at a Los Angeles event honouring Australians (how apt) in 2005. It was her second marriage (see: Tom Cruise) and Urban’s first, and they seem to have been going strong until recently.
Last year, Kidman told people at a press event for her Netflix series The Perfect Couple that the term ‘perfect’ didn’t apply to their marriage, saying “you’re heading for trouble if you consider yourselves the perfect couple... I’m not a believer in perfect.” A few months before that, Urban brought Kidman to tears with a speech in which he said she showed him “what love in action really looks like.”
“Four months into our marriage, I’m in rehab for three months,” he said at the time. “Nic pushed through every negative voice, I’m sure even some of her own, and she chose love. And here we are 18 years later.”
And yet. In September, Kidman filed papers to a court in Nashville asking for the marriage to be annulled due to “marital difficulties and irreconcilable differences.”
Court filings, obtained by the Daily Mail and E! News, include a child support worksheet that lists the pair’s monthly earnings at $100,000 (£74,000) each. The documents also outlined a parenting agreement for their daughters, Sunday Rose, 17, and Faith Margaret, 14, which is awaiting a judge’s approval.
Lily Allen and David Harbour
If there’s a breakup the internet has struggled to look away from, it’s Lily Allen and David Harbour’s. A quick refresher: Allen and Harbour got together in 2019, married after a whirlwind year in Vegas in 2020, and moved to New York together. Earlier this year, it was announced that they were separating; Allen took time off from Miss Me?, the podcast she runs with best friend Miquita Oliver, for mental health reasons.
Nine months later, she drops West End Girl, an excoriating break-up album that accuses Harbour (or at least, her fictional husband) of a whole load of things, including breaking the rules of an open relationship. The internet went wild, and to add to the drama, Harbour has just kicked off his press tour for the final season of Stranger Things. Juicy.
“It took my life falling apart for me to find my authentic voice,” Allen has said, explaining that she wrote and recorded the album in just 10 days last December. Reflecting on the process, she told Interview Magazine: “I feel very differently about the whole situation now. We all go through breakups and it’s always f***ing brutal. But I don’t think it’s that often that you feel inclined to write about it while you’re in it.”
Cat Deeley and Patrick Kielty
British pop culture was shaken this summer when Cat Deeley and Patrick Kielty announced the end of their 12-year marriage, confirming their separation in a joint statement in July. “We have taken the decision to end our marriage and are now separated. There is no other party involved,” they said, adding that they would remain “united as loving parents” and asking for privacy.
Behind the scenes, hopes of a reconciliation had reportedly faded months earlier. Friends of Kielty’s family are said to have realised the split was final when Deeley did not attend his mother Mary’s funeral in March. Kielty was visibly emotional as he carried her coffin through his hometown, while Deeley’s spokesperson explained at the time: “Cat remained at home to be there for her two young children before and after school on this very sad day.”
Attention then shifted to the couple’s shared home. The £5 million north London house they bought in 2023 and began renovating had been central to their lives together. In September, removal vans were seen outside a nearby rental property, suggesting the separation had become more concrete. Kielty is reported to be staying there, a short distance from the five-bedroom house they once planned to make their long-term family home.
Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom
Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom called time on their nine-year relationship this summer. The pair, who confirmed their split in July, stressed that the break-up was amicable and that their priority remains co-parenting their daughter, Daisy Dove.
Their love story stretched back to 2016, with a brief separation in 2017, a reunion, an engagement in 2019 and the arrival of Daisy in 2020. Now, Perry appears to be offering her own version of events, not in an interview, but through her music.
The pop star’s track Bandaids had been widely read as a window into the end of her relationship with the Pirates of the Caribbean actor. On the song, she suggests emotional fatigue and unmet expectations, lamenting that she “tried all the medications” and “lowered my expectations” to no avail. “Got so used to you letting me down / No use trying to send flowers now,” she continues, before landing on the chorus: “Telling myself you’ll change, you don’t / Bandaids over a broken heart.”
And in a year already heavy with celebrity plot twists, Perry has since surprised fans again, hard-launching a new relationship with former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.
Tim Burton and Monica Bellucci
September closed the chapter on Tim Burton and Monica Bellucci’s relationship. The filmmaker, 67, and the Italian actor and model, 61, confirmed their split in a joint statement released that month, striking a tone of calm finality rather than scandal. “It is with much respect and deep care for each other that Monica Bellucci and Tim Burton have decided to part ways,” the pair said in a statement to AFP.
Their story began long before the romance itself. Burton and Bellucci first met briefly on the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, when both were in long-term relationships. It wasn’t until 2022, when Bellucci presented Burton with a Lumière Award at the Lumière Festival in France, that they reconnected.
Romance rumours followed soon after, sparked by sightings of the pair walking arm in arm in Madrid. They made things official the following year, confirming their relationship with a joint appearance at the Rome Film Festival in October 2023.
Bellucci in her first interview following the breakup spoke to Vogue Italia and framed their relationship as something meaningful. “There are roads that, at a certain point, cross for a path that continues forever…Tim’s road and mine met to make a path together and then split again,” said Bellucci. “As long as I live, however, Tim will always have a unique place in my heart.”
Jessica Alba and Cash Warren
Jessica Alba ended her marriage to film producer Cash Warren after 16 years. Sharing the news on Instagram with her 20.6 million followers in January, the Fantastic Four actor framed the separation as part of a larger personal reckoning.
“I’ve been on a journey of self-realisation and transformation for years — both as an individual and in partnership with Cash,” she wrote. “I’m proud of how we’ve grown as a couple in our marriage over the last 20 years and it’s now time for us to embark on a new chapter of growth and evolution as individuals.”
The emphasis, she stressed, remains on their family. “We are moving forward with love and kindness and respect for each other and will forever be family,” Alba added, noting that their three children, Honor, 16, Haven, 13, and Hayes, seven, “remain our highest priority”.
Alba and Warren met in 2004 on the set of Fantastic Four, where she was starring as Susan Storm and he was working as an assistant to director Tim Story. She has previously recalled that Warren slipped her a note on set, signed with a dollar symbol to match his name, that read: “I really, really like you.” The couple married in 2008, eloping while Alba was nine months pregnant with their first child, a detail she shared with Glamour in 2022.
They went on to welcome daughter Haven in 2011 and son Hayes in 2017. Nearly a year on from announcing their split, both appear to be moving forward separately: Alba has been linked to actor Danny Ramirez, while Warren has been connected to model Hana Sun Doerr and actor Seanna Pereira.
Shaun White and Nina Dobrev
Nina Dobrev and Shaun White’s relationship ended a year after White’s elaborate engagement, with sources pointing to a fundamental difference in what each wanted next. After more than five years together, the couple split in September, People confirmed at the time.
One insider told the outlet: “She is devastated. There was one reason: She wanted a family and wanted to get married — and he didn’t.” Another source disputed that framing, saying they both “wanted marriage and kids” and that the decision “wasn’t just one-sided”.
The cheating rumours gained traction after Dobrev shared a TikTok lip-syncing to the line: “What’s your advice for women trying to fix their man? Listen, Bob the Builder, he’s got 10 other women trying to fix him too, and you all look like a damn construction crew.”
As speculation spread online, a separate source was quick to shut down rumours of infidelity. Speaking to Us Weekly, they said: “Nina is devastated. They had finally started planning the wedding and things were in motion. There was no cheating at all during the course of their five-and-a-half-year relationship. They were very loyal to each other. Any online speculation that suggests otherwise is ridiculous.”
Rami Malek and Emma Corrin
Earlier this year it was revealed that Emma Corrin and Rami Malek went their separate ways after two years together, ending one of the more private relationships in recent celebrity memory.
Corrin, 30, and Malek, 44, are understood to have ended their relationship several months before reports of the split emerged in April. They were first linked in July 2023 after being spotted together at a Bruce Springsteen concert in London, before being photographed kissing at a restaurant in Margate, Kent. By last year, they were making low-key red-carpet appearances, including at the Venice Film Festival, and were reported to have bought a £5 million house together in Hampstead.
Despite the milestones, the pair rarely spoke publicly about their relationship. When he did, Malek was effusive but brief, once describing Corrin as “fascinating” and praising a Thanksgiving dinner she cooked for him that “blew him away”.
True to form, neither Corrin nor Malek has commented on the split.
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