Shevardnadze, then a Komsomol activist, met her in the last years of Stalin's life, ignoring warning that it would be fatal to his career to marry a woman whose father was executed as an "enemy of the people".

[2] Even Nanuli initially rejected Shevardnadze's marriage proposal, fearing her background would ruin his career, but he did not back down.

[3] In the 1960s and 1970s, Nanuli Shevardnadze worked as a journalist and specialist in the Russian language, editing a popular women's magazine in Tbilisi.

During her husband's tenure as Soviet Foreign Minister in the 1980s, she befriended the wives of many top American officials.

In the mid-1990s, she campaigned against the adoption of orphaned Georgian children by foreigners, arguing this threatened Georgia's already difficult demographic situation.