Angela Lansbury saved daughter from the clutches of Charles Manson by uprooting from US to Ireland

The late Angela Lansbury — who died in the early hours of Tuesday at her Los Angeles home just days before her 97th birthday — once had to pry her daughter from the clutches of the convicted murder of Charles Manson.

In a 2014 interview with DailyMail.com, Lansbury revealed that Diedre, now 69, had started running in the 1960s with a mob led by the musician turned mass murderer.

To keep her daughter and the rest of her family safe, the Murder, She Wrote actress moved her entire family from their Los Angeles home to Ireland, where her mother’s family came from.

Lansbury said the problems with Diedre and her eldest son Anthony, now 70, started in the 1960s when they fell under the rule of drugs.

“It started with cannabis, but moved on to heroin,” explains the Sweeney Todd star.

Their drug use brought her children, who were then only teenagers, into unsavory circles.

“There were factions in the hills above Malibu that engaged in deadly pursuits,” she continued. “It pains me to say it, but at one point Deidre was in a crowd led by Charles Manson.”

Like some of Manson’s followers, who would later commit the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders, Diedre was reportedly drawn to the cult leaders’ charms.

“She was one of many young people who knew him—and they were fascinated,” Lansbury continued. “He was an extraordinary character, charismatic in many ways, no doubt about that.”

Fearing the kind of trouble her daughter would face if she stayed in Manson’s circle, Lansbury suggested a big move abroad.

”I said to” [husband] Peter [Shaw], “We have to leave.” So we rolled up our sleeves and moved the family to a house I found in County Cork,’ she said, explaining it was a kind of coming home, even though she was born in London.

“I was drawn to Ireland because it was my mother’s birthplace and it was also a place where my children wouldn’t be exposed to any more bad influences,” Lansbury continued. “I have another house there that I try to visit at least once a year.

“So I refused all work for a year and just stayed home. I bought Elizabeth David’s books and learned to cook well,” she added, referring to the popular British cookbook writer. “It was a great time in my life.”

A change of scenery turned out to be just the recipe for her children, who were doing well in Ireland.

“Anthony pulled out of his bad habits pretty quickly,” Lansbury said. “It took a little longer for Deidre, but she’s finally married and now lives with her husband in Los Angeles, where they run their own Italian restaurant.”

Anthony would later follow in his mother’s footsteps in the entertainment industry, and the two even worked together when he directed 68 episodes of her Murder series, She Wrote.

Even though her family was all right, the thought of what could have happened to her children still terrified Lansbury decades later.

‘It fills me with fear. Peter and I had no idea what was going on,” she admitted. ‘But then we had no experience with drugs. We didn’t realize how important it was to find a pipe in a drawer. Why should we? And when we did, we didn’t know how to help them. There were also no experts at the time who could advise the parents of children from good families who used drugs and sometimes overdosed. It was like an epidemic.’

“Certainly, I have no doubt that we would have lost one or both of our two if they hadn’t been transferred to a very different milieu, the simplicity of life in Ireland,” she added.

“We finally found a doctor who prescribed methadone, a heroin substitute, which helped with the withdrawal symptoms when Anthony and Deidre were off the hard drugs. We were so lucky to see what was going on just in time.’

Manson was eventually convicted in 1971 of first degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for seven murders committed by his followers in 1969.

While he is not believed to have explicitly ordered the murders, his conduct and teachings convinced a jury that he was responsible for the murders.

On the night of August 8-9, Manson’s followers murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate (who was the wife of director Roman Polanski), along with her boyfriend Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger of the Folger family, Polish writer and director Wojciech Frykowski and Steven. parent. On August 10, Manson’s followers broke into the home of Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary and brutally murdered the two.

Manson died in prison in 2017 at the age of 83.

Diedre’s connection to Manson doesn’t seem to have been close enough to implicate her in the cult’s 1969 murders, as Lansbury told Radio Times in 2017 that the family moved after their house burned down in 1970.

She said both Anthony and Diedre had to learn how to cook and garden in order to remain self-sufficient in their new Irish home.

In Jeff Guinn’s 2014 book Manson: The Life And Times Of Charles Manson, he noted that Diedre never joined Manson’s cult full-time, but that she was still helpful to him, as he and other Manson family members’ stock of clothing or car parts without worrying about the cost, because Didi paid for everything with her mother’s credit cards.’

However, they were eventually canceled and she reportedly withdrew from Manson’s circle.