Found dead at 50, troubled son of Diana Dors who was on drugs by age of nine and had champagne in his baby bottle
THE youngest son of film siren Diana Dors has died days after turning 50 when he reportedly lapsed back into alcoholism.
Jason Dors-Lake, the youngest of the actress’ three sons, was found in his flat by a friend.
He had openly spoken of his turbulent upbringing and the legacy of problems with alcohol and drugs it left him with.
Mr Dors-Lake was only 14 when his glamorous mother – dubbed Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe – died from cancer and, five months later, his father, actor Alan Lake, shot himself dead outside his son’s bedroom.
Before then the young boy had been exposed to his parents’ decadent lifestyle which, he admitted, involved ‘smoking pot when I was nine’ and being given champagne in his bottle to ‘keep me quiet’ when he was still in a pram.
Friends say Mr Dors-Lake had planned a birthday trip with his girlfriend to Colombia last week but hadn’t been allowed on the plane because he was too drunk. She went without him and he returned to his council flat in Notting Hill, west London.
‘I think he was just drinking a huge amount and had taken some pills and just didn’t wake up,’ said someone who knew him well.
‘A friend had to climb through the window to check he was okay and found him.
‘Jason had a hedonistic lifestyle so this was always on the cards. I know he’s been living a precarious life for quite a long time and he goes up and down.’
Mr Dors-Lake, who followed his mother into acting, acquired her estate later in life and set up a small business selling merchandise to her fans.
His mother scandalised the nation with her wild sex parties in the 1950s with her first husband Dennis Hamilton. The parties continued through her second marriage and her third with Lake.
Guests at the couple’s home – Orchard Manor, a mock-Tudor mansion in Sunningdale, Berkshire – could be found snorting cocaine off glass-topped tables or frolicking naked in the water.
Among the party-goers were top models, celebrities and even gangsters such as the Krays. No attempt was made to shield the young boy from the goings-on.
Mr Dors-Lake once said in an interview: ‘I just assumed it was normal to wake up in the morning and find dad and Oliver Reed in the front room from the night before… some people would be falling over and having sex, and dear old Mum, who did not personally participate, would be there in a kaftan or whatever, interrupting to offer everybody a cup of tea and baking scones.
‘Mum was a terrible gossip and she lived off telling stories of what went on. That was why we had them. If you watched a film with her, as the credits rolled she would start telling you that so and so had slept with this person on the film, who had been married to whoever.’
The partying only stopped in 1984 with Dors’s death from ovarian cancer at 52. Not long after Jason’s father committed suicide. He was 43.
Death duties, tax demands and legal wrangles meant the young boy was left with barely any money for his own survival. He was sent to live with a half-brother in California and in a few short years blew his modest inheritance.
The millions that Dors was rumoured to have salted away with the access code DMARYFLUCK – after her real name, Diana Mary Fluck, changed because it was easily mispronounced – have never been traced.
Mr Dors-Lake tried to carve out a career as an actor, also dabbling in composing and recording music. He had a role in the long-running daytime TV drama Doctors and a minor, unbilled, part in Rupert Everett’s 2001 romantic comedy South Kensington.
More recently, he appeared in a number of documentaries about his mother. For most of the time, though, he was unemployed and living on benefits.
Nine years ago, convinced his then girlfriend was losing interest and still consumed by feelings of abandonment that haunted him since the death of his parents, he jumped off a balcony of the thirdfloor apartment they shared, and fell head first to the pavement. He broke his neck, arm, hip and foot and fractured his skull. It was a miracle that he survived.
‘I decided to calm my life down and move out of London with all its temptations,’ he said in an interview at the time, when he was living at a flat in Kent. But his new life did not last long. In 2016, he cut a pitiful figure when he appeared before magistrates in Hammersmith where he admitted shoplifting two bottles of wine worth £19.81 from Waitrose.
He told the court he had felt suicidal after an argument with another girlfriend which had led to them splitting up and he needed a drink.
His death was announced yesterday by Facebook group Diana Dors: The Legacy.
‘It saddens me to inform you of the passing of Diana’s youngest son, Jason Dors-Lake, at the age of 50,’ the message read. ‘Please join me in offering condolences, thoughts and prayers to Jason’s loved ones and close friends at this time.’
Cabaret star Mandy Winters – who has performed as a Diana Dors tribute act – said she was devastated by his death.
‘He was a guy just full of love,’ she said. ‘It’s just so tragic. He was one of the best – a total character to say the least.
‘He was just a wonderful, wonderful guy and it’s so terrible at such a young age.’
Jason never blamed his parents for the way his life turned out but he once admitted: ‘Maybe it would have been better for me if Mum hadn’t been famous.’
‘Drinking a huge amount’ ‘He was a total character’