Cynthia Nixon – known to die-hard Sex and the City fans as Miranda Hobbes – has spoken candidly about her wife Christine Marinoni in a new interview, with the actor revealing that she had never kissed or dated a woman before meeting the activist.

Nixon was previously in a long-term relationship with her male high school sweetheart Danny Mozes. The pair began dating in 1988, going on to have two children together, and they stayed together until 2003 – just one year before Nixon entered a relationship with her future wife.

“I had never dated a woman before or even kissed a woman or anything,” she told the Radio Times.

Read more: Cynthia Nixon says Sex and the City was based on a true story

Nixon continued: “So when we started seeing each other, Christine kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for me to panic about what this would mean – to my career or to myself – as if somehow I just hadn’t noticed that she was a woman.

“And then she met my mother and that was when she stopped worrying about it.”

Nixon and Marinoni – who welcomed a son of their own in 2011 – became engaged in 2009. But, while the 50-year-old actor said she had never planned to get married, she was the first to feel comfortable being a “wife”.

“[Christine] protested a lot at the beginning and wanted a more gender-neutral term, like ‘my spouse’.

“I said, ‘You think I’m doing that, you’re crazy!’”

Read more: Cynthia Nixon to star in Emily Dickinson biopic

Nixon rarely addresses her personal life in the press – although, in 2010, she explained to The Advocate that she had been the one pushing her publicist and manager to publicly confirm her and Marinoni’s relationship.

“I was like, ‘Really, we can just confirm?’” she said. “So that’s what we did. It was so fantastic.”

In the same interview, Nixon went on to explain her “fluid” sexuality – and revealed exactly what it was about Marinoni that drew her to her.

“If anybody, prior to my meeting and falling in love with Christine, had asked me about what I think about sexuality, I would have said I think we're all bisexual," said Nixon.

“But I had that point of view without ever having felt attracted to a woman. I had never met a woman I was attracted to [before Christine]. And maybe if I'd met her when I was 20, I would have fallen in love and only dated women. But maybe if I'd met her at 20, I wouldn't have responded at all. Who knows?”

Read more: The 25 feminist films we can’t wait to watch in 2017

Nixon added: “A lot of what I love about her is her butchness. I’m not saying I fell in love with her in a sexually neutral way. I love her sexuality — it’s a big part of what I love about her — but I feel like it was her.

“It wasn’t something in me that was waiting to come out. It was like, ‘this person is undeniable. How can I let this person walk by?’”

Nixon may be famous for playing redheaded Miranda, but she’s set to take on a very different role as Emily Dickinson in next month’s A Quiet Passion.

From her schoolgirl days in Massachusetts, to her premature death in 1886, A Quiet Passion is set to examine the poet’s prolific writings, her fascination with love and morality, her relationship with her sister, Lavinia (Jennifer Ehle), and her notoriously reclusive lifestyle (towards the end of her life, Dickinson would only communicate with people from the other side of a closed door), and her unwavering feminist beliefs.

But, while the film is steeped in tragedy, it is also wildly funny, heart-warming, and inspiring – no surprise, then, that it generated much awards hype when it was screened at the Toronto Film Festival last autumn.

Images: Rex Pictures