If Angela Lansbury led her career from the front for eight decades, she didn’t hesitate to walk away from the sets when necessary. The British actress, who died Tuesday at the age of 96, briefly left the United States in the 1960s to save her children from drugs … and Charles Manson, the leader of a sectarian movement at the origin of a series of murders .
the star ofArabesque trusted in him daily mail a few years ago in this episode. In the 1960s, she lived in Malibu with her husband Peter Shaw, to whom she remained married until her death in 2003. Together they raised her two children, Anthony and Deidre. Barely teenagers, they fall into drugs.
“It started with cannabis, then they went to heroin,” he recalled in 2014 in the British newspaper. “There were groups practicing deadly hobbies in the hills of Malibu. It’s painful to say, but at one point Deidre was part of a group led by Charles Manson.”
Young people “fascinated” by the guru
Death in prison in 2017, at the age of 83, Charles Manson terrorized the United States in 1969. His disciples, called “the family”, committed nine murders on his orders, including that of actress Sharon Tate. She is 26 years old and married to director Roman Polanski, she was murdered by one of the guru’s followers when she was eight and a half months pregnant.
“Deidre was one of the many young people who knew him (before the murders, editor’s note), and they were fascinated. He was a character who escaped from the ordinary, charismatic in many ways, without a doubt.”
“Peter and I had no idea (that Anthony and Deidre were on drugs),” he added. “At that time we had no experience with drugs. We didn’t know what it meant to find a pipe in a drawer (…) And when we understood, we didn’t know how to help them. And there were also no experts who could give advice to parents of children from good families who were using and sometimes overdosing. It was like an epidemic.”
“We have to go”
Worried about seeing her children rock, she decides to leave the country: “I told Peter: ‘we have to leave'”. The family moved from California to County Cork, Ireland. “I was attracted to Ireland because it was my mother’s home country, and it was also a place where my children would no longer be exposed to bad influences (…) so I rejected all role proposals for a year and stayed home. (…) It was a wonderful time in my life.”
Because the tactic paid off: “Anthony kicked his bad habits pretty quickly. It took Deidre a little longer, but she ended up getting married. She and her husband now live in Los Angeles, where they have their own Italian restaurant.”
“I’m sure we would have lost one, or both, if we hadn’t brought them into a totally different environment, the simple life in Ireland,” she concluded.
“We finally found a doctor who prescribed methadone, a heroin substitute, which helped ease withdrawal symptoms… We were very, very lucky to have figured this out. Which happened just in time.”
Source: BFM TV
