Mortifying moment Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell were forced to reveal their secret trysts... as the double Emmy winner stood naked brandishing a poker

Some Hollywood stars like to announce they're a couple to considerable fanfare, but Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell were so discreet that their romance only emerged thanks to some Brooklyn burglars.

They were co-starring in the FX drama series The Americans, playing Soviet agents posing as an ordinary married couple in 1980s suburban Washington DC, when they started a real-life relationship.

They tried to keep it under wraps but one night in 2013 soon after they started seeing each other, the couple was woken in Russell's Brooklyn Heights apartment to hear burglars rummaging around upstairs.

They ran naked into the living room, Rhys brandishing a poker from the fireplace. But the intruders escaped with loot they'd crammed into his backpack.

When police arrested the intruders, the local district attorney sensed a good news story and arranged to have the stolen items returned to Russell on the set of The Americans.

It was at that moment that a member of the production crew exclaimed loudly, 'Wait, that's not Keri's backpack - it's Matthew's.'

The truth was out – and sadly in a manner worthy of a sitcom rather than the tense spy drama they were making.

'After that every day we'd see the look of concern on the producers' faces: "Please, don't split up and hate each other,"' Rhys said last year.

Instead, by the time they got to season four, Russell was pregnant – a detail that was artfully concealed during filming and post-production. Now they have a ten-year-old son, Sam, and two older children – 19-year-old River and 13-year-old Willa – from Russell's former marriage to contractor, Shane Deary.

Rhys and Russell were back in the spotlight again last week, minus backpacks, when Russell joined the Welsh actor at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. There, he made history by becoming the first person to win two lead acting prizes on the same night.

Rhys was named best lead actor in a limited series for the psychological thriller The Beast In Me, in which he plays a sinister real estate magnate who may have murdered his wife.

He then won best lead actor in a comedy for the night's big winner Widow's Bay, a horror-comedy hybrid in which he plays the mayor of a haunted New England island.

Rhys, 51, a modest star and a very proud Welshman, said it was a 'real shock' to be honored for The Beast In Me.

On stage, Rhys dedicated his second award 'to the great and good people of Wales, who were as much a nurture as anyone else.'

He thanked the family, friends and colleagues who supported his career, including his parents who 'kicked me on to the stage at a very early age.'

He did not, many noted, follow the now-established Hollywood awards custom and thank Russell. But the couple were swift to bat back any suggestion that she felt in any way slighted. 

He later told the BBC he 'sincerely' never thought he'd win for The Beast In Me: 'I hadn't really prepared anything, as may be apparent from the vomit of a speech I came up with.'

'So much of this profession we all know is about luck and timing, and I know my luck and timing were in the lap of the gods when both projects aligned and I got to do both within the same year,' he said. Few actors are ever so self-effacing – or honest – when they accept a major award.

Rhys didn't just bring Russell as his guest – she had been nominated, too. In fact, the couple had five nominations between them, for three shows. Russell, 50, had two – drama lead actress and executive producer of The Diplomat, in which she played a US diplomat thrown into the hot seat when she's appointed ambassador to the UK during an international crisis.

Rhys notched up a third win as an executive producer of Widow's Bay when it won for Best Comedy series while Russell walked away empty-handed.

Some acting couples have proved to be ultra-competitive, but Rhys and Russell were happy to joke about it. The former, who is far more of an extrovert and who cracks so many jokes that it can be difficult to work out when he's being serious, teased Russell by saying their children had arranged a betting pool on their respective chances of winning.

He praised Russell for always being so gracious to fellow nominees, adding: 'So she's always the winner, if I'm perfectly honest.'

Even if it sounds like they'd grimace at the description, the evening confirmed the pair as one of Hollywood's pre-eminent power couples.

They are also one of its most understated and lowkey. They still live in Brooklyn, generally home to celebrities who prefer to go under the radar, and indeed in the same house where Russell was living when they first fell in love (and dashed into battle against the burglars).

She later bought the property, and had it renovated by her ex-husband Shane Deary. Rhys, Russell and Deary (with whom their children spend part of each week) get on so well that they even sometimes go on vacation together.

It would be fair to say that many stars work hard on their public image and are not nearly so affable and down-to-earth in the flesh.

However, people who know them say that Rhys and Russell, who have never married, are exactly how they appear in public: unstarry, unaffected and friendly.

They have educated their offspring at a local liberal private school, Saint Ann's, where so many famous actors send their children, including Ethan Hawke, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jennifer Connelly, that the couple's presence is likely to go unremarked.

Some celebrity parents leave minions to deliver and collect their children, but Rhys is often there at morning drop-off. 'They are extremely nice and super-friendly,' a school insider told the Daily Mail about the Rhys-Russell partnership. 'It's certainly not true of every famous parent here, but there's no celebrity vibe with them.'

At weekends, they retreat upstate and go hiking with a group of friends, some of them fellow Saint Ann's parents, they call their 'Mountain Family.'

Russell told Variety last month: 'The majority of our friends are not actors, and we're not that famous. People don't really care about us - in a great way.' That, it has to be said, was before her other half triumphed at the Emmys.

Variety put them on its cover under the headline 'Television's First Couple.'

They have never married and Russell admitted last year that one of the reasons was her desire to keep their finances separate, while another was the 'freedom' of not having to wear a ring on her finger.

After The Americans' final season in 2018, when Rhys also won best actor in a drama at the Emmys, he announced in his speech that if he proposed onstage, Russell had promised to punch him 'clean in the mouth.' Perhaps he hadn't been joking.

In the UK, thespians tend to draw an important distinction between actors and stars. The former just do the job, cutting their teeth on the stage, and are not interested in, or particularly affected by, fame. Rhys certainly falls into the 'actor' category.

Fame has come relatively late in his career. The son of teachers (his father was a headmaster), he was born and raised in Cardiff, the Welsh capital, where he attended schools largely conducted in the Welsh language. The parents were strict Methodists and on Sundays the family would go to chapel, as church is called in Wales, where his mother played the organ.

Rhys, who initially wanted to be a farmer, said he has often felt like an outsider in life, attending sports-obsessed schools as the only pupil who wanted to act (but who was keen on rugby) and, later, being 'the young Welsh person' at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) London's most prestigious drama school.

The subsequent feeling of insecurity has fed his 'constant self-criticism' which he has said is the trait he most deplores in himself. He can come across as chippy about the English, blaming England, Wales's more powerful neighbor, for instilling the Welsh with that insecurity. His dream project is to make a movie which he has described as a 'Welsh Braveheart,' the shamelessly anti-English action drama starring Mel Gibson.

In 1993, he won the prestigious Patricia Rothermere Scholarship (established in honor of the wife of a former owner of the Daily Mail) for best drama student and it proved to be the first of many awards.

He had applied to RADA because his best friend, fellow Welsh actor and Fantastic Four superhero star Ioan Gruffudd had already won a place there. The pair, who'd gone to the same schools in Cardiff, later shared a home in Kilburn, north London, for ten years where they would, like secret conspirators, speak Welsh together.

Today, he and his son, Sam, converse in Welsh (the boy usually answers in English), a language that even in Wales less than 20 percent of people can speak. Rhys has repeatedly said that the survival of the language is the most important thing to him.

After finding his first real success on stage, he got his big break in 2000 when he played Benjamin Braddock in a West End stage version of the 1967 Dustin Hoffman movie The Graduate. Every night Rhys, then 26, had to watch his 45-year-old Hollywood co-star, Kathleen Turner, strip naked as Mrs Robinson.

'I was just embarrassed,' he would recall. 'It ran for six months, and I can honestly say I didn't look at her once when she was naked.'

He went on: 'I always thought that a) I can't look at her because she's going to think 'You little perv' and b) I didn't want to because of… Welsh nerves. I hope she didn't take it badly.'

At the same time, ironically, he was dating an older woman off-stage, in this case Ciara Parkes, the publicity agent of actor Jude Law. He also reportedly had a fling with actress Sienna Miller, but Rhys wouldn't comment on the claims.

Acting alongside Turner got him noticed – and got him a US agent who encouraged him to try his hand in Hollywood.

He'd gone there before without much success but in 2006, he relocated full-time to Santa Monica and became part of a hard-partying community of Welsh ex-pats known as the LA Tafia (the British nickname for the Welsh is 'Taffs').

He spent the next five years honing his American accent playing gay lawyer Kevin Walker in the ABC prime-time family drama Brothers & Sisters.

The show ended in 2011 and Rhys was single (to the despair, he said, of his mother) when he was cast the following year in The Americans.

He had actually met his co-star before at a kickball party in Los Angeles in around 2002 at which he recalled asking for her phone number. Later, he drunkenly left a message on her answering machine.

She never called him back, and during rehearsals for The Americans, he reminded her.

She eventually remembered. 'You were that buffoon that wouldn't stop calling,' she told him.

California-born Russell had, hardly surprisingly, a very different path to a lead role in a major TV drama that would transform their careers.

Russell, whose father was a Nissan Motors sales rep, was 15 when she first appeared in the Disney Channel's revival of The Mickey Mouse Club after impressing producers not with her acting (in which she had no experience) but her dancing.

The accidental actress, as she's been dubbed, joined a shiny young troupe that included Britney Spears, Ryan Gosling and Justin Timberlake.

Russell and her mother spent months living near the studio in Orlando, Florida, where she dated another cast member, Tony Lucca.

Without ever having to do what most aspiring actresses do and wait tables, she rapidly graduated to movies, starting with the 1992 comedy Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, a sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Russell got her first starring role playing the title character in the WB Network drama series Felicity, playing the character from 1998 to 2002 and winning a Golden Globe for it in 1999.

She briefly contemplated giving up acting in 2004 and going to college but decided against abandoning a lucrative career even though many of her films and roles – usually playing a wholesome pin-up type – were forgettable.

In 2006, she became the face of CoverGirl cosmetics, later discovering she'd been the third choice after the more expensive Drew Barrymore and Jessica Alba.

Russell married Shane Deary on Valentine's Day 2007, her long-time boyfriend who she'd met through mutual friends. Their son, River, was born the same year and their daughter, Willa, in 2011, but in December 2013, Russell announced they were separating amicably, a process that started earlier that summer. They divorced the following year.

Back then, the timing of her split from Deary and the beginning of her relationship with Rhys was the subject of some speculation with some wondering if the latter had been a factor in the collapse of the marriage.

Rumors, which they dodged, that The Americans co-stars were romantically linked had started some months before People magazine announced them as 'a couple' in April 2014, after they were seen in a New York theater. Russell had been spotted stroking Rhys's hair.

Asked by The New Yorker last year how they got together, Rhys admitted that, after having had on-set romances in the past, he had been wary of the 'pitfalls.' He told another interviewer: 'These things often end quickly and then the set isn't a pleasant place to be.'

Consequently, his relationship with Russell progressed 'slowly,' he said. 'With a lot of, kind of, "Oh, we shouldn't. Oh, this is terrible, we shouldn't!" ...Inevitably, a bottle of red wine would be opened.'

As befits a star who has criticized other actresses (Katie Holmes, for example) for making endless bad movies just to stay in work and who married a carpenter rather than a celebrity, the bookish Russell has publicly been ambivalent about stardom.

She now admits how when she was younger, she was so determined 'not to sell out' that she occasionally came off as 'a little jerk.'

'It's so creepy,' the former child star told The New Yorker last year, adding: 'I shouldn't say that.' When asked whether she meant acting or celebrity, she said: 'Both.' She said she was never sexually victimized, noting that her manager accompanied her when she once met Harvey Weinstein, but admitted she'd experienced some uncomfortable moments.

Although Rhys is careful to avoid publicly discussing politics, it's not hard to work out where they stand. The couple attended one of the final state dinners of the Obama Administration while Russell was a guest at Gloria Steinem's 88th birthday party.

Rather like the Russian sleeper agents they played in The Americans, the couple do their best to fade into the background. However, with his latest barn-storming success at the Emmys, 'Television's First Couple' may find that increasingly difficult.