Irish actress Victoria Smurfit has opened up about how happy she is with the new love in her life, filmmaker Alistair Ramsden.
The 40-year-old, who currently stars as Cruella De Vil in US fantasy series Once Upon A Time - which is screened here on RTÉ One - went public about her new relationship earlier this year after meeting him on the set of the film Bait.
"It's nice to know there's life in the old dog yet. It's a brave new world and modern families are being accepted so much more and I'm really happy," she told the December issue of Image magazine.
In February last year she filed for divorce from husband of 15 years Doug Baxter. They're parents to three children, Evie Dorothy (10), Ridley Belle (seven) and Flynn Alexander (six).
Reflecting on her marriage break-up, Smurfit said she tries to focus on the positives instead of, as she puts it, "sounding like a victim".
She said: "I think that hideous old adage about trusting yourself is something I've only learned recently and uh, it's so hard to talk about this without sounding negative or like a victim, because I'm not interested in any of that rubbish.
"I think no matter what, life comes with knocks, that's how it comes. That's how you learn.
"If I'm on a film set, I don't want the director to tell me what I did right, I want him to tell me what I can improve. Nobody is untouched by the swings and roundabouts of life and love and pain and loss."
Already established as an actress here in Ireland and in the UK, in 2011 Victoria Smurfit took a gamble and moved to Los Angeles. She says she was more of afraid of not giving it a go in Hollywood than of failing over there.
"The decision to move was partly to do with seeing my life playing out. I could see how it would play out until the end of time," she says.
"I was more scared of waking up one day and asking why did I never try it? I had a fear of that and I had a fear of regretting what I didn't do."
Here she is in action as Cruella DeVil in Once Upon a Time:
