Dec. 23 – Veteran character actress, Angela Lansbury, has revealed why she quit Hollywood for most of the last decade — her two children had become addicted to heroin and one was in danger of joining the Charles Manson cult “family” of killers.

British-born Miss Lansbury, now 54, is currently playing in a successful New York Broadway stage musical Sweeney Todd, but still keeps her home of self-exile, a rural farm house in County Cork, Ireland.

The actress, who last week received an acting award from an American showbusiness magazine, made dozens of films over 20 years, from National Velvet in 1944 to The Manchurian Candidate in the early sixties.

Then her appearances tailed off until Death on the Nile in 1978.

She has now made the reason public in an extraordinary account of courage and determination in which she and her husband, film producer Peter Shaw, subjugated their careers for the children.

“Our therapy worked,” she said, “and it’s all over now. Unfortunately that is not always the case with a drug like heroin.”

The children, Anthony and Deidre, both now in their twenties, live successful lives totally free of the usually fatal heroin habit.

Anthony divides his time between acting parts in London and looking after the farm house and a herd of cattle. Deidre is an up-and-coming actress and model.

But in the late sixties the picture for Miss Lansbury was very different.

Mr. Shaw, then a senior executive at MGM Studios, and Miss Lansbury, were both on the brink of big success, Hollywood style.

They lived in a beautiful shore-front house in Malibu, but, according to stepson David Shaw, 28, “dad often didn’t go to work and she blamed herself for the times she was away acting and what had happened to the kids.”

The kids, then in their early teens, were “living on heroin.” Between 1965 and 1969, she has revealed, Anthony and Deidre were hospitalized over their addiction, but there seemed to be no cure, she said.

“They had to have fixes every day and it seemed nothing could be done. At that time they were in their mid-teens, around 15.”

During those days, Charles Manson, now serving a life sentence over the grotesque Hollywood murders of actress Sharon Tate and her friends at their house in 1969, was a frequent caller at the Lansbury-Shaw Malibu home — asking for Deidre.

“Thank God she never went to them,” said stepson David. “But I think she looked at it and discarded it. And it was before the murders.”

Then late in 1969 the family home in Malibu was virtually destroyed in one of the fires which sweep through the nearby forests every year. Miss Lansbury took it as a sign and removed the entire family to Ireland, leaving her neighbours to claim their insurance and set up home again.

“The two children hardly knew what was happening,” she said. “They were mostly stoned at the time.”

The actress believes that the enforced exile in a region where heroin was simply unavailable, plus the new country environment and the stone farmhouse with its open fire, made the two aware of the corruption of South California at that time.

What she modestly does not mention was that she was constantly with them, helping their withdrawal agonies and offering a new life.

“There were days when we thought one of us might not be there any more. We were living on a knife edge all the time,” recalled David Shaw. “But things … are good in our family now.”

For Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed actress for more than 30 years, the drama that took place in the Irish farmhouse was her greatest success.

By CHRISTOPHER REED