After two decades as Amy Fleming, Amber Marshall can feel like someone Heartland fans already know. Her real life with husband Shawn Turner looks a lot like a Heartland storyline, but it’s quieter than Amy’s and has much less drama. They met at a horse show, married at home with their horses, and have spent the years since turning bare land into a working farm.
A horse-show meet-cute
Marshall and Turner are both from London, Ontario. According to the London Free Press, they were even born in the same hospital, St. Joseph’s, although Turner’s family moved away when he was young. They didn’t meet until years later, when Marshall was already starring in Heartland, at a horse trade show back in London.
By then Marshall had already moved west. As she tells it on her official website, she relocated to Alberta for good in 2009, bought a small farm outside Calgary, and met Shawn a year later.
The wedding: at home, on horseback
They married on July 27, 2013, and not on the Heartland set. The wedding took place at the farm Marshall owned near High River, the Alberta town where much of the show is filmed.
The venue was an easy call. “I’m a homebody and so is Shawn,” Marshall told Hello! magazine. “Right away we thought, ‘We’re having it at home.'” They planned it themselves, too. “We were our own wedding planners, and it wasn’t stressful for me,” she said.
Turner built the altar by hand. Photos show the posts carved with their names, AMBER on one side and SHAWN on the other. Marshall called it “the most beautiful memento of our day.” She rode in sidesaddle on her horse Hawk, with her father holding the reins, and he had only learned to handle the horse moments before the ceremony. Hawk is the same horse who plays Spartan on Heartland today.
About 150 guests came, including castmates Michelle Morgan and Chris Potter. “I don’t have a sister, but having Michelle there, who plays my sister on the show, was so important to me,” Marshall said. After the ceremony the newlyweds rode off to the reception a bit faster than planned. “The applause made the horses a little nervous,” she recalled. “It was quite an exit!”
Who is Shawn Turner?
When they married, Hello! described Turner as a photographer. He keeps a low public profile, but he shows up all over the farm. Marshall’s animal pages list three of the horses as Shawn’s. Nitro was bought as a heel horse for team roping. Hippy is a sorrel that had belonged to a good friend, and Shawn had roped on him a fair bit before he bought him. Slider is a young bay roan he’s “teaching… the ‘ropes'” for doctoring cattle and arena roping. The couple is active in rodeo, too.
Marshall describes him in small, specific ways. Their late cat Mouzer “was the whole reason my husband went from not liking cats at all, to sleeping with Mouzer curled up in our bed.” Their late dog Remi, who appeared on Heartland, was “Shawn’s best friend from the day we brought her home.” The animal love runs in his family. When Marshall played Annie Oakley on Murdoch Mysteries in 2026, she pointed out that her mother-in-law’s dogs are named Annie and Oakley.
“Shawn’s my sounding board,” she told Cowgirl magazine this year. “He’s gentle but honest. If I’ve had a bad day, he’ll say, ‘I know it was rough, but I didn’t make it rough, so let’s find a way to be happy tonight.’ Sometimes I need that little poke.” He’s also the bigger thrill-seeker of the two. When they went skydiving with Heartland castmates, Marshall said, “He’s the adrenaline junkie between us, but heights aren’t his thing. He ended up loving it.”
The farm they built themselves
In 2020 the couple left the wedding farm and moved a little further out, to a treed property with a log cabin. It needed a lot of work. “There was no fencing, no barn, nothing, just a little cabin,” Marshall said. “So we built everything ourselves. Barns, paddocks, shelters. Every year, we add something new.”
It’s a working place, not a backdrop for photos. They keep horses, cows, dogs, cats, a rooster, and a peacock named Peter, who sometimes wanders into the living room. There was once an alpaca named Betty, whom Marshall remembers as the farm’s “Nanny Betty,” the protector of the calves. “When I’m filling water troughs or cleaning pens, I’m not on my phone or worrying about anything,” she said. “It’s therapeutic.”
Her work, before and beyond Amy
Marshall was acting long before she met Turner. She started at London’s Original Kids Theatre Company at about seven, signed with a Toronto screen agent at 11, and got her first TV role on the kids’ series Super Rupert. At 15 she played the title role in CBS’s The Elizabeth Smart Story (2003), which earned her a Young Artist Award nomination. Her early credits also include the 2002 TV movie The Christmas Shoes.
Some side projects came after Heartland was well established. She played the lead in UPtv’s Love in Harmony Valley in 2020, and she guest-starred on Murdoch Mysteries in January 2026. In 2022 she opened Marshall’s Country Store in a diner she renovated on Main Street in Turner Valley, now part of the town of Diamond Valley. Shawn was there when she cut the ribbon, and she cut it with a pocketknife. The physical shop has since closed, and the store now sells online.
On kids, and keeping some things private
Fans often ask whether the couple has children. Neither of them has ever announced any, and Marshall hasn’t made it part of her public story. She has said she now keeps more of her life offline on purpose. “When we keep certain moments to ourselves, they mean even more,” she told Cowgirl.
“Contently settled and happy”
Thirteen years after that horseback wedding, Marshall sums up this stage of her life simply. “Contently settled and happy,” she said. “I feel like this is my place.” As Heartland starts its 20th season, she says she plans to stay. “I can never see myself relocating again,” she told CBC. “This is home for me.”
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