“She was definitely an angel,” Martin Henderson told Home & Family of the stranger who helped save his life.

Back when Martin Henderson was struggling to quit drinking, a real-life angel helped lead him towards the path to sobriety.

Just like his onscreen daughter in Miracles from Heaven, Henderson’s miracle came in the form of an apparent accident. In the movie, his daughter is cured of a debilitating illness after falling from a tree. Henderson’s miracle, on the other hand, came from a stranger he happened to bump into at a museum.

“There’s been a few key periods in my life where I had to take a leap of faith and one of the biggest was for me when I was 27-years-old and I had had a history of alcohol abuse and I decided to get sober,” the Grey’s Anatomy alum revealed on Home & Family.

After committing to quit alcohol, Henderson was terrified his friends, mostly drinking buddies, would abandon him and he would “be banished to a horrible life.”

On his 27th birthday, the actor decided to visit the Auckland Art Gallery in his native New Zealand, where he met a complete stranger who would change his life.

“There was this teeny little Scottish woman who was from Edinburgh where my mom was born and it just so happened that her and I were the only ones on the tour that day,” he explained.

“For some unknown reason – I had never met this woman, I didn t know her – I just blurted out, I said ‘I’ve got to share something with you, I’m really terrified. I just gave up drinking and I don t know what to do and I’m scared and I’ve got all this shame about how I’ve been living.’ I was really quite a mess.

“And she just stood there and listened intently to everything I had to say and there was something so warm about the way she was receiving my story that I just kept unloading more and more,” he added.

After he was finished getting everything off his chest, the woman revealed that she runs an alcoholic treatment center and had spent “the last 35 years helping alcoholics and drug addicts.”

Henderson said she then “proceeded to give me the most incredibly inspired supportive talk” in which she “talked about how in life, we all have a path, but at any one time we walk off the path and we can meander around but the path doesn t go away.”

Her words had a deep impact on the actor. “I felt like I’d lost myself and she was just reminding that all you gotta do is step back on that [path],” he explained.

“She was definitely an angel,” Henderson, now sober for over a decade, said. “And I think about her from time to time.”