Fiona Shaw says she met her wife, Dr. Sonali Deraniyagala, at a time when she "might have been closing down my life"

Speaking to Jessie and Lennie Ware on their Table Manners podcast, she said: "I met her in New York more than 10 years ago. I was doing Testament of Mary on Broadway, and I met her. She's a fascinating person, because I'm now introduced to a whole world of Sri Lanka, which has really opened up my life at the very moment that I might have been closing down my life. It's been great."

Fiona previously described her spouse as an "unusual" person.

After suffering a devastating tragedy, when Sonali lost all of her family in the terrible 2004 tsunami, Fiona admitted her relationship helped her "understand the value of things".

She told Good Housekeeping magazine in 2020: "I'm married to a very unusual person, but maybe it took a very unusual person to be willing to marry me. Sonali's children, parents and husband were all killed in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, and I'm very cognisant of that. Its sorrow doesn't dominate our life, but it definitely defines it. I understand the value of things by being with Sonali. She lives knowing that at any moment the world could end because she lost her world. It has brought me into land, I suppose, about lots of things; a lack of arbitrariness about life."

Table Manners is released weekly. Listen now via https://tablemanners.komi.io/.