Last week, Tom Cruise took daughter Suri and son Connor to an awards ceremony in New York. Meanwhile, Katie Holmes was on the other side of the planet in Taiwan. The official reason was to promote an ice skating event.

Now that Holmes filed for divorce on Friday, according to People, Holmes' Taiwan trip seems more like a warning sign than anything else.

In recent months, the couple was rarely photographed together, even when the two were in the same city. Back in New York this week, Holmes was photographed all over town with Suri, wearing matching outfits, going to see the movie Brave, eating ice cream, all without Dad.

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes before the split

Tom, also in New York, was busy filming his new movie Oblivion and wrapping up his promotion of Rock of Ages. Even though he credited Katie for his interest in doing Rock of Ages (and apparently gave her his bejeweled codpiece), she didn't show up at the movie premiere.

What has been spotlighted, particularly in the Daily Mail, is Holmes' recent style. The usually impeccably dressed actress has been photographed looking like, well, a down-to-earth mom. Untucked button-downs, jeans, loosely wet knotted hair -- none of which would raise alarm bells unless you were a superstar known for a meticulously managed makeover since her marriage began more than five years ago.

According to Life & Style, the couple hadn't been spotted together since early April. (Bear in mind, the publication also claimed Holmes was pregnant again.)

The magazine points to their very different lives, as Cruise traveled around the world hopping from film projects, and his wife stayed under the paparazzi microscope with daughter Suri, working on smaller projects.

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But another stressor on the relationship could stem from Cruise's devotion to Scientology -- it's long been blamed for his split from Nicole Kidman -- and the serious allegations of his mistreatment of lower-ranked members of the religious group, as this New Yorker article pointed out.

If Holmes thought her marriage to a superstar would be a boon to her career, she was wrong. Since their union began about six years ago, her professional life has taken a backseat to being a wife and mother. That may have been her choosing, but a recent interview with Cruise in Playboy suggests an unsettled Holmes.

Cruise praised Holmes' creative endeavors but also inadvertently hinted at a marked distance between them. "One week I said to her, "You've been up in the middle of the night. Is everything okay?" She smiled and then threw this thing on my desk and said, "I wrote this script."

Consider the fact that her husband, a producer, didn't notice she was writing a script, and the idea that he hadn't questioned her latenight busy work until it was done, and it paints a picture of a less than intimate union.

It also suggests Holmes wanted more from her career than just being known as a superstar's wife.

It's something Cruise's second ex-wife, Nicole Kidman, was all too familiar with.

When asked in an interview with Vanity Fair whether women could have both marriage and career, she said of her marriage to Cruise: "I think I had to choose. I think (the marriage) would have come down to it. I suppose it wasn't meant to be."




By Piper Weiss