Lesley-Anne Down is opening up about a terrifying encounter she experienced as a teenager that ended with the actress throwing herself out of a moving car.
The Reagan star, now 72, recalled the frightening incident in a new interview with Fox News Digital while discussing what she described as “three times in my life when I should have been killed by other people.”
Down was 18 when she ordered a taxi while in the countryside. When a car arrived, she climbed inside, but she quickly realized something didn’t feel right.
“As soon as he’s driving away, I’m already feeling that horrible feeling,” Down recalled.
The North and South star looked around and noticed the vehicle didn’t appear to have the equipment she expected to see inside a taxi.
“I looked around and there were no radios or anything, like a taxi is supposed to have. So I said, ‘Could you pull over, please?’ He said, ‘Oh no, we don’t need to pull over. We’ll be there soon.'”
When the driver refused to stop, Down made a split-second decision.
“I opened the door and threw myself out of the 25-mile an hour car,” she said. “I fell onto the curb in a puddle. I was covered in blood. There was nobody around.”
According to Down, the driver didn’t stop to help her.
“What did he do? He pulled the car door shut and drove off at top speed,” she recalled.
It wasn’t the first time Down had experienced the frightening feeling that told her she was in danger.
When she was about 11, Down said she ran ahead of her mother while the two were returning home from a laundromat. As she crossed a footbridge, a man approached her and told her he needed a babysitter.
“He told me he needed a babysitter, and he would call my parents when we got to his house,” Down said. “I remember having one foot in the car.”
Then she saw her mother.
“Seeing my mother broke the spell,” Down recalled. “Then he was gone. But I still remember that horrible feeling swooping in before my mother came.”
Down believes that earlier encounter helped her react when she found herself trapped inside the suspicious car years later.
“I didn’t freeze up because I couldn’t,” she explained. “That feeling was familiar to me. I’ve been through it.”
Down’s family had already experienced another frightening coincidence when the actress was 10.
In 1964, 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey was abducted and murdered by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the killers behind England’s notorious Moors murders. Downey was close in age to Down and had a strikingly similar name. Down recalled her mother receiving phone calls after the murdered child’s identity was announced.
“It wasn’t me, of course,” Down said. “But it certainly freaked her out.”
Brady and Hindley murdered five children and teenagers between 1963 and 1965. They were arrested in 1965 and later convicted in connection with the killings.
Down went on to have a decades-long acting career. She earned a Golden Globe nomination for playing Madeline Fabray LaMotte opposite Patrick Swayze in the 1980s miniseries North and South and appeared alongside Harrison Ford in Hanover Street.
She also starred in The Pink Panther Strikes Again and later played Jackie Marone on The Bold and the Beautiful. Her experiences have influenced the advice she now gives women hoping to pursue careers in Hollywood.
“Never go anywhere alone,” Down warned. “Always have your agent or your publicist with you at all times.”
Down also revealed that she turned down two opportunities to play a Bond girl because she worried the role would follow her throughout her career.
“Being a Bond girl was skimpy clothing, pretty face, not much dialogue, no acting involved, kissing James at the end in a spacecraft or whatever,” she said.
“I thought if I became a Bond girl, then I’d be a Bond girl for life. I didn’t want that for myself.”
More recently, Down portrayed former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opposite Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan in Reagan. She said the opportunity to play Thatcher came “out of the blue.”
Down has since moved from California to Georgia after deciding more than a decade ago that she wanted a different life.
“My choice was to live the life I’m living now,” she said.
Reagan is available to rent or buy on digital platforms.
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