Actress Olivia Wilde knew her marriage was over the day she and her now ex-husband completed renovations on their new house - because it didn't feel like home for her.
The Tron: Legacy star ended her eight-year marriage to Italian prince Tao Ruspoli last year (11) and now reveals it was a new home that made her realise the romance was over.
In a frank TV chat with The Conversation host Amanda DeCadenet, which aired in America on Thursday (31May12), the pretty star said, "We'd just finished a huge renovation on the house... We built a new house and it was perfect... The day it was finished is when I knew it wasn't the house. I think that I finally started being really honest with myself and that was the scariest thing to do.
"(I said), 'I am the luckiest person on earth; there is this extraordinary person who is my partner in life, everything seems perfect, why aren't I happy?'
"I kept trying to do different things, change different things to make everyone happy and I moved houses... I changed all the outside stuff... I thought, 'It's the house, it's wrong for us and it's making us something we're not and we've lost something,' and I thought, 'It's the environment... We need nature'. I kept thinking, 'We need grass'.
"We get the house, get the grass - (it's) still not working, so I think, 'We've got to renovate the whole thing,' and I would literally walk in to the room of a house that I bought because I loved... and I'd say, 'I'm being decapitated, the house is decapitating me,' and he (Ruspoli) would say, 'OK, we'll bust up the ceilings...' He was really trying to accommodate all these requests."
Wilde admits she still has regrets about ending her marriage: "You don't want to break up with someone, you don't want to end a marriage, especially if you really like the person. You just know that something's off and so you try to change everything else.
"The day I knew I had to ask for a divorce was the worst day of my life... I had no idea how to be alone."