Upstairs’ actress Lesley-Anne was snatched by car stranger
FILM and TV star Lesley-Anne Down has revealed that a stranger tried to snatch her off the street when she was 10 years old.
The Upstairs Downstairs actress, now 66, recalled a man trying to force her into his car.
She said: “I’d run far ahead of my mother. When she caught up five minutes later, the man had stopped me, told me he needed a babysitter and he would call my parents when we got to his house.
“He was putting me in his car. I remember having one foot in the car but seeing my mother broke his spell and I screamed. My mother ran to me and told me to run to my father, which I did.
“He called the police, and they seriously swarmed the place and even used helicopters to look for him.
“His car was found abandoned and wherever he lived was deserted.”
The incident, in Putney, south-west London, happened in the same year Lesley-Anne started out as a child model and actress.
She worked on her first film The Smashing Bird I Used To Know aged 12 and was voted Britain’s Most Beautiful Teenager at 15. But it brought her unwanted attention from men who wanted her to appear naked. She said: “I would say that the precariousness for me started in the 70s, when I was 16, 17.
“It’s not that I was ever raped, but certainly raped mentally – the kind of pressure that is put on you. The pressure to sleep with them. I was very good at getting out of those situations. But they were so horrible and so unpleasant. ‘Slimebags’ is the only way I can put it.”
A mother of two, she met third husband, director and cinematographer Don FauntLeRoy, 67, on the mini-series North And South in 1985.