Helen Mirren: I loved cocaine until I realise how it reached me

Helen Mirren has revealed she used to love taking cocaine but gave it up when she realised what was involved in getting her the drugs - and who was profiting from it.

She told GQ magazine recently that in the 1970s: “[I used to do] a bit of cocaine. I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties.

“But what ended it for me was when they caught [Nazi war criminal] Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, in the early eighties. He was hiding in South America and living off the proceeds of being a cocaine baron.

“And 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 f**king horrible man in South America.

“And from that day I never touched cocaine again. Until that moment I had never grasped the full horrifying structure of what brings coke to our parties in Britain.”

She added that she also tried marijuana (”I hated marijuana. It made me paranoid and unhappy.”) and LSD (”Never again” after a bad trip with friends in her 20s).