Dame Helen Mirren 'loved' taking cocaine

London, Sept 1 : English actress Dame Helen Mirren has admitted that she used to "love" taking cocaine, and that she had also tried LSD and marijuana.

Mirren, 63, revealed that she had been using it until the 1980s, and had stopped only after Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was discovered living as a drugs baron in Bolivia.

"A bit of cocaine. I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties," the Sun quoted her as telling The Independent. "But what ended it for me was when they caught Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyons, in the early Eighties. He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron.

"I read that in the paper, and all the cards fell into place and I saw how my little sniff of cocaine at a party had an absolute direct route to this horrible man in South America.

"Dope always made me feel miserable and paranoid and unhappy," Mirren, who won an Oscar for her movie The Queen, added.

ANI