It's the stuff of at least a billion romantic movies: a woman is saved by an attractive stranger just moments before she makes an almost-fatal mistake. So when London journalist Laurie Penny nearly walked into the path of an oncoming cab in New York yesterday, who was her knight in shining armor?

None other than 'The Notebook' star Ryan Gosling.

In a series of tweets, Penny explained a combination of absent-mindedness and her British roots caused her to look the wrong way before crossing a busy NYC street (as you probably know, our neighbors across the pond drive on the left side of the road, not the right as we do here in the U.S.).

That's when she heard a male voice say, "Hey, watch out!" It wasn't until her life flashed before her eyes that she realized it was Gosling who'd brought her to attention.

Penny, who has almost 40,000 Twitter followers, recounted the story on her feed and was subsequently bombarded with replies and media requests, something she found inexplicably odd.

But perhaps nothing explained her bemusement more than the title of a piece she wrote about the whole incident for Gawker: 'Ryan Gosling Saved Me From a Speeding Car But There’s War In the Middle East So Everyone Calm Down.'

He truly is a real hero.

More From ScreenCrush