Damian Lewis honored his late wife Helen McCrory with a touching tribute.

The Homeland alum currently starring on Billions wrote a laudatory speech in the Sunday Times on Sunday April 18 for the actress best known for her roles in Peaky Blinders and the Harry Potter films. Two days earlier, Lewis announced on Twitter that McCrory, mother of her daughter Manon, 14, and son GulliverThe 13-year-old had died at the age of 52 after battling cancer.

“Helen was an even more brilliant person than an actress,” the 50-year-old actor wrote in the Sunday Times. “She was certainly a person of the people. ‘I am much more interested in who I am with than where I am,’ she would say and naturally wanted to share. But she also lived by the principle of kindness and generosity. That you put these things into the world to make them better, so that people feel better. “

Lewis, who married McCrory in 2007, said he had “never known anyone who was so deliberately happy,” and that she even thanked her carers repeatedly on her deathbed. He said she always “tipped”, especially taxi drivers and waiters, a job she once had herself. The actor said McCrory always “made every person she met feel special, as if they were the only person in the room”.