(entertainmentwise.com) - Dame Helen Mirren has admitted that she loved snorting cocaine when she was younger.
The actress admits that she only knocked her coke habit on the head because she realised she was funding evil criminals.
Dame Helen says she used to take coke when she was younger in the 1970s and 1980s but quit because notorious Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was holed up in South America living off the proceeds of selling the drug to other countries.
"(I used to do) a bit of cocaine. I loved coke. I never did a lot, just a little bit at parties," she tells GQ.
"But what ended it for me was when they caught 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," the 63-year-old adds.
"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."