MEG RYAN - RYAN PRAISES CROWE'S GRACE UNDER FIRE

Actress 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."