Move over, Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth.
Angela Lansbury, the beloved Tony-winning star of “Murder, She Wrote,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” who passed away on Tuesday, was wise enough to whisk daughter Deidre Shaw away from cult leader Charles Manson before the infamous 1969 murders committed by his followers.
In 2014, Lansbury told the Daily Mail, “It pains me to say it but, at one stage, Deidre was in with a crowd led by Charles Manson.” She recalled that Deidre and her son Anthony found Manson “charismatic” and were “fascinated” by him.
Once she realized hard drugs were involved, she made the decision to move the whole family from Los Angeles to Ireland where they wouldn’t be exposed to all the “bad influences” of Hollywood. “I said to Peter, ‘We have to leave,’” she said of her late husband Peter Shaw, who died in 2003.
Lansbury took a temporary hiatus from acting and, luckily, both kids kicked the habit. “Moving to Ireland was like beginning all over again and it afforded us that time to get back to basics really,” she told the British newspaper. “We were so very, very lucky we spotted what was happening just in time,” she said. Thinking about what might have happened, “fills me with dread.”
Anthony would go on to direct Lansbury in 68 episodes of her series “Murder, She Wrote,” and the 1992 TV movie “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris.”
Members of the Manson “family” committed the Sharon Tate and LaBianco murders in August 1969, killing nine people in one of the most shocking series of crimes in California’s history.
Manson was tried and sentenced to death in 1971, which was later commuted to nine life sentences. He was denied parole several times and died on Nov. 19, 2017.
