Rula’s drink drive shame after crash with her grandson in back seat
ACTRESS Rula Lenska said yesterday she was ‘ashamed and disgusted’ with herself after flipping her car with her three-year-old grandson in the back seat.
Her Mini reportedly clipped a parked car and rolled onto its side as she drove the toddler through Twickenham, west London, on Monday evening. Police arrested the 68year-old on suspicion of drink-driving and being drunk in charge of a child. Paramedics were called but no one was injured.
Yesterday the actress, whose TV career started in the 1970s and who was married to actor Dennis Waterman in the 1980s, said: ‘I feel ashamed and disgusted with myself, there is no excuse.’ In her post on Twitter she added: ‘I just thank my guardian angels that we are both totally unharmed.’
Officers charged Miss Lenska, from Chiswick, west London, with drink driving on Tuesday at a west London police station.
They dropped possible charges relating to her grandchild, believed to be the son of
‘The boy was pretty terrified’
her daughter Lara, 36, from her first marriage in the 1970s to the actor Brian Deacon. Miss Lenska is on record as saying she ‘adores’ her grandson.
Witnesses to the crash, who rushed to help, described the actress, who appeared until 2011 as Claudia Colby in Coronation Street, as being very shaken.
Steph Pentreath, a 26-year-old retail manager, ran out of her nearby home when she heard a loud bang. She said: ‘[The Mini] had flipped over onto its side. We were trying to get doors open but they were locked. We managed to get the boot open.
‘There was a boy aged three to four in there. He was pretty terrified. She was breathalysed and then they arrested her.’ Muneeb Ali Khan, 23, who said it was his family’s parked car which was damaged in the crash, added: ‘Everyone was alright, not even a scratch.’
Miss Lenska, born Countess Roza Lubienska, is descended from Polish aristocracy. Her parents fled to England in 1946. In 2006 she featured in Celebrity Big Brother where she infamously pretended to feed milk from her hands to politician George Galloway while he lapped and purred like a cat.