Helen Mirren reveals cocaine use, date rape past

Oscar winner Dame Helen Mirren says she was a victim of date rapes and used cocaine as a young actress in the 1960s. The much-loved 63-year-old star of The Queen will shock her fans with the revelations, published in newspapers on Monday. She told GQ magazine, when asked if she'd ever tried drugs: "A bit of dope when I was younger... A bit of cocaine. I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties. "What ended it for me was when they caught (Nazi) Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, in the early 80s. He was in South America and living off the proceeds as a cocaine baron. I never touched it again." Dame Helen also tried cannabis and LSD before rejecting both. She said: "I hated marijuana. It made me paranoid and unhappy." Then the actress described incidents during her early adulthood: "I was very innocent when I went to college in London. I found guys were horrible, rude, insulting. I was looking for love and just met all these creeps." Asked about date-rape, she said: "I was, yes, a couple of times. Not with excessive violence but by being locked in a room and made to have sex against my will. "I was polite and didn't have the courage to say **** off to men. I wish I'd had those words in my self-defence arsenal." Asked why she did not report the incidents, she said: "You couldn't in those days."

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