Home and Away's Debra Lawrance And Dennis Coard's love story from the screen to real life

While many celebrity relationships start at work, Home And Away couple Debra Lawrance, 66 and Dennis Coard, 72, have made it last, having celebrated 31 years of marriage.

Their romance started when Debra who played Pippa Fletcher in Home And Away met Dennis after he was cast to play her second husband Michael Ross on the Aussie soap.

"Home And Away gave me my life," Debra revealed to Woman's Day in 2011. "If I didn't have a steady job, I don't think I would have had children. I met Dennis, we have two great children, and he's a brilliant father.

"I met Dennis at exactly the time my ovaries were yelling, 'Hello!'" she added.

"I must have smelled his testosterone. I flirted with him and there was chemistry, then I spent the next six weeks being rude to him. I guess I was testing him. Our minds meet on a whole lot of levels, especially with the theatre. We are absolutely in tune."

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Two years after meeting on-set, the couple married in Avalon, not far from where they film Home and Away in Sydney's Northern Beaches.

When the couple celebrated their 30th wedding anniversary last year, Debra shared her thoughts to her socials.

"My gratitude knows no bounds. Dennis is the kindest, most generous person I know... a truly wonderful father... add hardworking, supportive, hilariously funny and extremely attractive and you start to see why we’ve managed to travel through the last 3 decades together," she wrote.

"Happy Anniversary dearest Dennis. Much love and heartfelt thanks for agreeing to be the father of our two beautiful children."

While the pair welcomed their children Grace Coard, now 30, and William Coard, now 23, it hasn't all been plain sailing.

Debra opened up to her I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here castmates earlier this year about how she had suffered multiple miscarriages.

After she listened to Liz Ellis recalling how she'd had two miscarriages while going through IVF, Debra shared that she had also been through a similar situation.

"I had that. I lost four babies before I got [her youngest son] Will," she said.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," Ellis responded through tears.

"They weren't meant to be," Debra continued. "I lost two single babies and then identical twin girls. They were later into the pregnancy, they had a syndrome, and they were never going to survive. And my belief, Liz, is when Will was born... he was the baby we were waiting for. And so it makes him really precious."

Both Debra and Dennis have worked consistently since their time on Home And Away both on TV and in the theatre, with them once again appearing together in the TV show Five Bedrooms a few years ago. But raising their children together was the most important thing.

We didn't want to be away from them growing up," Debra told Woman's Day.

"Our expression of our relationship is as parents to our kids - but not in a bad way, we're just a family.

Debra can next be seen in upcoming TV mini-series Human Error, while Dennis has films Love, Tea & Epiphany and Strange Creatures, both of which are in post-production.

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