Fiona’s marriage forged from tragedy
It’s the unlikeliest showbiz romance — how the star of Harry Potter and Killing Eve has tied the knot with a Cambridge educated professor who lost her husband, children and parents in the Boxing Day tsunami
ONE is a Rada-trained actress who spent decades dedicated to her career, her nomadic thespian lifestyle putting paid to any prospect of romantic stability. The other is a Cambridge- educated economics professor for whom family was the crux of her existence, until they were wiped out in a cataclysmic event.
Given their different trajectories in life, one wouldn’t really expect the paths of these two women to have crossed.
But this week it was revealed that Fiona Shaw, an Olivier award-winner and star of the hit BBC dramas Killing Eve and Mrs Wilson, and Dr Sonali Deraniyagala, who survived the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Sri Lanka that took the lives of her husband Stephen, two sons and parents, are now married.
After reading Wave, the critically acclaimed 2013 memoir that Sonali wrote about her ordeal, Fiona was reportedly so ‘blown away’ that she requested a meeting in New York, where she was starring in a Broadway production and Sonali is a visiting professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at the city’s Columbia University.
An unlikely friendship blossomed, which turned into something more — and led to the marriage that Fiona, 60, recently revealed in a newspaper interview.
It’s a love story no one saw coming, and of which there are very few details.
For someone who consistently shied away from discussing her private life and for years was seen as rather an enigma, Fiona’s public affirmation is testament to her feelings for tragic and brave Dr Deraniyagala, 54.
‘I didn’t really have a domestic life because I was always working. But I do have one now, which I love,’ she said.
Famously secretive, Fiona had never previ- ously discussed her private life, relationships or sexuality, once telling an interviewer who probed: ‘I wish I knew myself. I’m a very private person who comes from the provinces, who’s as surprised by the way my life is lived as anyone else.’
Meanwhile, the family of Sonali’s late husband Stephen, 40, who was killed by a 30ft wave along with their children Nikhil, seven, and Vikram, five, and Sonali’s parents, are said to be happy that she has found happiness again.
Stephen’s father, Peter Lissenburgh, 82, 2, a retired lorry driver from Tilbury, Essex, ex, said: ‘It didn’t shock me but it did surprise rise me a bit that she had found love with another ther woman. But she lost so much and went through such heartache, now that she’s found happiness, that’s all I care about. Clearly learly she wanted to build a new life where there ere are not as many memories of what her life used sed to be like.’
While Fiona has not experienced grief on anywhere near the scale of her wife, she too knows the pain of unexpected loss.
Born in Ireland to an eye surgeon father and physicist mother, she was studying philosophy at Cork University when her brother Peter died in a car crash, aged 18. ‘He was going to a rugby match with friends. When he died, it stopped me. I was just having my debut at the RSC, playing Celia in As You Like It. It was devastating.’
This was perhaps the catalyst for what she describes as a melancholy predisposition. ‘I’m not a depressive by nature,’ she once said, ‘but I have enormous sadness in me. I can see it in my face.’
Every year Shaw returned to her brother’s grave, where he is buried next to her grandmother, grandfather and great-uncle.
‘The dead are part of your life,’ she said, elaborating on her experience of losing a loved one in another interview: ‘What I realised is that if you are close to someone who died, you suffer grief, of course — but also people close to you suffer grief because of your grief. That can make you the object of revulsion as well as sympathy.’
They are sentiments that may not be widely understood but will perhaps have resonated with Sonali, who survived the tsunami by clinging to a branch of a tree, and has since struggled with how to share with strangers the ‘horrifying’ enormity of her bereavement.
‘How can I reveal this to someone innocent and unsuspecting?’ she has said. ‘ With those who know “my story” I talk freely about us, Steve, our children, my parents, about the wave. But with others I keep it hidden, the truth. I keep it under wraps because I don’t want to shock or make anyone distressed.’
She and her family were four days into a holiday at the Yala Safari Beach Hotel on Sri Lanka’s southeastern coast on December 26, 2004 when Sonali spotted the ocean
Sonali was swept along for two miles by the wave
looking ‘a little closer’ to the hotel than usual, before a 30ft wave engulfed the beach and raced towards their building.
She and Stephen — her university sweetheart — fled with their children. So panicked was their escape, there was no time even to alert her parents, who were staying in the next room.
They jumped into a passing Jeep and at first she thought they had escaped the wave, but then the vehicle was swamped and overturned. Sonali was swept for nearly two miles by the force of the current.
She would later write: ‘I was being dragged along and my body was whipping backwards and forwards. I couldn’t stop myself. When at times my eyes opened, I couldn’t see water. Smoky and grey. That was all I could make out. And my chest. It hurt like it was being pummelled by a great stone.’
Somehow, after 20 minutes of being swept along, Sonali managed to grab a tree branch, which saved her. But there was no sign of her family.
The body of her youngest son, Vikram, was identified along with those of her parents in the first week of January. But it wasn’t until four months later that the DNA of Stephen and her older son, Nikhil, was discovered among bodies exhumed from a mass grave.
Sonali, born and raised in Sri Lanka, had met Stephen, a research fellow for the Institute for Public
For six months, her friends kept a suicide watch
Policy Research, while both were studying economics at Cambridge University. They married in 1990.
Brought up in East London and educated at a comprehensive, Stephen had been not just her husband but her professional soulmate. They were involved in educational projects together in Sri Lanka, eschewing lucrative careers for altruistic endeavours that furthered social justice. Their marriage was so perfect, it was described as a ‘dream’ by a friend.
Unable to contemplate returning to the family home in North London, where pizzas still awaited her sons in the freezer for after their late-night flight home, and where Vikram and Nikhil’s leftover sweets from Hallowe’en still stood in an orange bucket in the kitchen, she stayed in Sri Lanka with an uncle and aunt.
The grief of losing her children, husband and parents must have seemed insurmountable. For six months after the tsunami, Sonali’s remaining family and friends kept a suicide watch as she turned to alcohol to numb her pain, stabbed herself with a butter knife and put cigarettes out on her hands.
After two years she moved to New York, partly to be nearer to her therapist, Mark Epstein, and partly to flee a country where everyone knew the extent of her crippling grief.
At first, her survival strategy entailed blocking out her life before the tsunami.
‘For a long time my whole defence had been to try not to remember anything of our lives before,’ she has said, admitting her old life felt so ‘unnervingly dreamlike’ that at times she wondered if it had ever existed: ‘I thought, let it all be a blur. Let everything be a blur.’
For three years, she said, she ‘tried to indelibly imprint “they are dead” on my consciousness, afraid of slipping up and forgetting, of thinking they were alive.’
It was Epstein who in 2013 suggested that she write the book, which attracted great critical
acclaim. Fiona, who won an honorary CBE in 2001 for services to drama, is also familiar with the desire for anonymity, albeit under very different circumstances, thanks to the fame her TV and film work has brought her, most recently in the hit drama series Killing Eve and Fleabag.
‘I can’t cross the street without people shouting at me from bicycles or cars,’ she said recently.
While she made her name at the RSC and National Theatre and appeared in the acclaimed films My Left Foot in 1989 and Three Men And A Little Lady in 1990, she only became a public face when she was picked to play sour-faced Aunt Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter film series.
Her acting career involved frequent travel and she became acquainted with New York society in 1995 while appearing in a reading of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. She was introduced to the editor and writer Jean Stein, the doyenne of New York, who took her under her wing and secured invites to several high-profile dinner parties. It is thought to have been through this group that Fiona met the mutual friend who is believed to have introduced her to Sonali, while Fiona was playing the mother of Christ in a Broadway production called The Testament Of Mary in 2013.
She had read Sonali’s book in her dressing room and described it as ‘astonishing’ and ‘amazing’.
It is not known when precisely she and Sonali became a couple, but as their relationship blossomed they discussed the idea of adapting Wave for the theatre, although the plans never materialised.
The couple have been to Sri Lanka together several times, where they are believed to have stayed with Sonali’s relatives in Colombo. They were recently pictured smiling together with Fiona’s friend, the theatre director Phyllida Lloyd, and have appeared at a literary festival there together.
In London, Fiona and Sonali, who is now professor in economics at the School of Oriental and African Studies, share a house in Islington. In New York they share a flat in Manhattan, where, Shaw recently said, ‘I keep bumping into ghosts of myself from my youth’.
While Shaw admits it is ‘a huge pleasure’ to be working with the writer and producer Phoebe Waller-Bridge (the brains behind Killing Eve, who has also cast Shaw in the second series of Fleabag, currently airing), any scrutiny of her private life is not something she relishes.
She is thought to have had a 15-year affair that lasted throughout the Nineties with the theatre director Deborah Warner, who described Shaw as her ‘actress of choice’, before being linked to model- turned- actress Saffron Burrows for several years after they starred in a production of The Powerbook in London in 2002.
She and Burrows, 14 years her junior and previously in a highprofile relationship with the director Mike Figgis, were named one of London’s most powerful lesbian couples in 2007 but never commented on their relationship, with Fiona once saying: ‘I don’t want to talk about Saffron. Whether we are together or not is a matter for us.’
Instead, she talked of her contentment with being single and living in a ‘community’ of people in North London. She has said she ‘suffered daily’ as her fertile years passed without the opportunity to have children. ‘I think I am very old-fashioned. I’d want to do it in as conventional a way as possible,’ she has said.
‘A relationship is sent by God and accident.’
It is a cause for celebration that, in Sonali, she appears to have finally found someone with whom she can share her nurturing instinct; an extraordinary woman whose identity will be forever entwined with her traumatic past but who has found happiness in circumstances she could never once have envisaged.
The couple have now visited Sri Lanka together