Ryan praises Crowe's grace under fire

Meg Ryan has praised ex-lover Russell Crowe for keeping details of her broken marriage to Dennis Quaid to himself when he was accused of being a home-wrecker.

Ryan insists her marriage was irreparably damaged long before she met and fell for Crowe on the set of Proof of Life and he became a shoulder for her to cry on as she went through divorce proceedings.

Looking back, Ryan feels she and Crowe were vilified by the media by seeming to have a romance that shattered her marriage, and she'll always be grateful to the actor for not telling the press what was really going on.

She says: "It was a very unhealthy marriage and it was pretty much not a happening marriage for a very long time. I probably should have left much earlier.

"I'm very sad that it all had to come apart in the way that it seemed to have. It was never about another man, it was only about my and Dennis' relationship just couldn't sustain.

"He (Crowe) wasn't a home-wrecker and he took a lot of heat for that and he had a lot of grace, frankly, about not talking about things that he knew were going on in my marriage and I'll be very grateful for him for a long time for that.

"Divorce is an impossibly hard transition in your life and he was there for a few months."