Cynthia Nixon admits falling for Christine Marinoni was "one of the great surprises" of her life

She said: "Falling in love with my wife was one of the great delights and surprises of my life, but it didn't seem like I became a whole new person, or like some door had been unlocked.

"It was like: 'I have fallen in love with different people in my life and they've all been men before. Now, this is a woman and she is amazing.'"

The 54-year-old star identitifes as queer because she doesn't feel any other terms for her sexuality sound "right".

She told Attitude magazine: "I could call myself a lesbian, gay, bisexual. But none of them seems really particularly right.

"To say 'queer' means, 'I'm over there, I don't have to go into the nuances of my sexuality with you'

"So I feel like 'queer' is an umbrella term, and it includes my formerly straight self, too."

Cynthia - whose eldest child, Samuel, is transgender - believes the LGBTQ community need to come together on certain issues as she's worried about a "divide" on particular topics.

She said: "I feel like there are certain issues that the right-wing seizes on again and again.

"They won't let go of abortion. They seem to have let go of a lot of the anti-gay rhetoric and anti-gay actions, but as they have sort of accepted gayness, they have focused on trans people, and on immigrants and on people of colour.

"It's a really peculiar thing, how much they [the right] try to separate us as a community.

"But [after same-sex marriage was legalised] we saw a great divide in our own community, too, between those who thought, 'I got my wedding ring, I can pass my money on to my spouse and not pay taxes, so I'm good, I'm done', as opposed to, 'we have so far to go for so many members of our community, we are still so far from the promised land, we're so far from having our full civil rights'.

"Trans people are a case in point, but also young, queer people of whatever stripe who are still, were being, tossed out of their homes and are living on the streets, many engaging in sex work to survive."