I met my wife after she lost her husband, parents and two sons in the tsunami
Actress Fiona Shaw tells John Hiscock about the remarkable woman who changed her views on life, death and marriage
Fans of hit series Killing Eve know Fiona shaw as Carolyn Martens – a cool, mysterious spymaster.
In recent episodes, the buttonedup MI6 boss has been struggling to express her feelings over the death of her son Kenny.
And daughter Geraldine’s efforts to make Carolyn “emote” have resulted in some brilliant tragicomedy moments from the award-winning actress.
But in real life Fiona can speak movingly about the life-changing impact of loss. Because her visceral reaction to one woman’s heart-rending story led them both to new love and life.
Six years ago, while performing on Broadway in the one-woman play Testament of Mary, Fiona read a book called The Wave.
It was Dr Sonali Deraniyagala’s account of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which killed her husband, parents and two sons.
The Sri Lankan economist was found half-naked and unconscious in a lagoon, clinging to a tree. In the years that followed, she turned to drugs and alcohol and contemplated suicide.
Fiona, 61, was so moved by the memoir that she wanted to meet Sonali. When a friend introduced them, the two women fell in love – and married two years ago.
The actress said of their first meeting: “We spent half an hour chatting. And when I left I thought, ‘I have just met life.’
“When I met Sonali, my name was up in lights on Broadway – the pinnacle of what actors want.
“But I was so weary of the entire thing. I was tired in my bones and I didn’t want to say it to anyone. So maybe this was at the right moment.
“Very quickly I thought, ‘I want to live with this person’ – though it was unlikely. Thankfully, she thought the same.
“It has been a beautiful thing to happen at this stage of my life.”
Fiona, who had a relationship with actress Saffron Burrows previously, added: “Sonali brings everything to my life – fun, laughter, food, as she is a brilliant chef, companionship and steadiness.
“She’s not interested in my filming life, so we don’t talk about it at all.
“Instead we talk of life and family, so it means my identity has become my domestic identity, not as a public person, which I’m so pleased about. “I’m married to a very unusual person but maybe it took a very unusual person to marry me.” The star has spoken previously about being aware of tragedy’s impact on their lives. She said: “Sonali’s children, parents and husband were all killed in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and I’m very cognisant of that. The sorrow doesn’t dominate our life but it definitely defines it. “I understand the value of things by being with Sonali. There’s a real sense of how near death is to the person I live with. She lives knowing that at any moment the world may end, because she lost her world.”
It has changed her view of marriage too. Fiona said: “I don’t think I could have married in my 20s or 30s because I don’t think I was that kind of person.
“I made a decision when I was about 26 to give myself entirely to the whims of work and travel, and I began tearing around the world.
“But marriage has made me not want to travel at the same rate.
“A lot of actors live like students. For a long time I had a small flat in London and lived abroad a lot. But in the last five years I’ve lived in a proper house.”
Fiona, who lives in Islington, London, was raised in County Cork, Ireland, by devout Catholic parents.
Her mother was a physicist and her “very, very strict” father was an ophthalmic surgeon.
Both disapproved of her acting dream. Her father only agreed to it if she went to university first. So after gaining a philosophy degree, she was allowed to study at RADA.
She joined the National Theatre, then the Royal Shakespeare Company and by her mid-20s was winning acclaim for her stage roles.
Then one of her younger brothers was killed in a car crash.
Fiona said: “When Peter died, it stopped me. I was just having my debut at the RSC. It was devastating.”
On returning to the stage, her grief brought a new emotional intensity to her work.
Her first big movie role was playing the carer of Daniel Day-Lewis’s disabled artist Christy Brown in 1989’s Oscar-nominated My Left Foot.
But she came to regret playing a lovelorn headmistress alongside Tom Selleck in the 1990 hit Three Men And A Little Lady.
“It ruined my career as anything viable as a heroine,” she once said. “I was a clown.”
Fiona went on to appear in Persuasion, Jane Eyre and The Avengers and played Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter films.
She has also appeared in numerous TV series, including US hit True Blood, and last year won the best supporting actress BAFTA for her role as Carolyn in Killing Eve.
Fiona had been working in Budapest on the TV crime drama Baptiste until filming was shut down by coronavirus.
“I’m only halfway through making it,” she said. “I don’t know if it’ll be continued as it is or if we’ll have to change some of the story. Will we be able to keep it set in a pre-Covid world?
“Nothing like this has happened before. But anybody who’s writing a piece of drama now will have to include this catastrophe, so I think that’ll be very interesting.”
She has spent much of lockdown in her garden but keeps in regular touch with her “very eccentric” mother, 94.
Fiona said: “My mother plays piano and sings for herself each evening as she’s locked in. She also drives a sports car and she plays tennis.
“Her influence on me was good and bad, like a lot of mothers. She was a very entertaining person but also very judgmental in many ways, and still is.
“When I was going to be in Killing Eve she said, ‘My goodness you can’t be on the television because your hair isn’t long enough. Will you grow your hair before you start the show?’
“I said, ‘It starts tomorrow – I don’t think I can grow my hair between now and then.’”
When lockdown is lifted, Fiona will travel to the US to make a new movie.
She said: “I have had a fantastic career and I haven’t hung around waiting for parts that didn’t exist to come along.
“Women are often portrayed as virtuous, so it’s wonderful to be not always good. I think Killing Eve has changed the landscape and the game.
“I have waited all of my life to play someone like Carolyn. Normally I’d be offered the part of a vicar’s wife or a schoolteacher or a doctor.
“But the thing about Carolyn is that she is mysterious and her mystery is that she knows a lot more than anybody else does. Yet she’s also a human being and in this season it is her very humanness that is being challenged, so it’s much more emotional.
“She is such a successful person but you chip away at the surface and you challenge the essence of her.
“I like her very much.”
Sonali brings everything to my life – fun, laughter, food and companionship