Killing Eve star Fiona Shaw makes a rare appearance with her Cambridge-educated professor wife Sonali Deraniyagala at Wimbledon day two

Fiona Shaw made a rare appearance with her Cambridge-educated professor wife Sonali Deraniyagala at day two of Wimbledon on Tuesday.

The couple, who married in New York in 2018, sat in the Royal Box with Celia Imrie, former cricketer Stuart Broad and his partner Mollie King.

The Killing Eve and Harry Potter star, 67, couldn't contain her laughter as she chatted with British actress Celia.

Their unlikely romance captivated headlines when they married, given their different trajectories in life.

Sonali, 62, survived the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in Sri Lanka that took the lives of her husband Stephen, two sons and parents.

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.

An unlikely friendship blossomed, which turned into something more and led to their marriage.

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 Sonali.

‘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 previously 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 said in 2019: ‘It didn’t shock me but it did surprise me a bit that she had found love with another woman. But she lost so much and went through such heartache, now that she’s found happiness, that’s all I care about. 

'Clearly she wanted to build a new life where there are not as many memories of what her life used 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 Fiona 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 south-eastern coast on December 26, 2004 when Sonali spotted the ocean 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 Policy Research, while both were studying economics at Cambridge University. They married in 1990.