Coronation Street icon Charlie Lawson, who played Jim McDonald, has boasted of his wild nights out with Katie Price taking “anything that we had got our hands on”. The Corrie legend told of his hell-raising lifestyle while playing hardcase Jim McDonald on the soap, reports the Mirror.
The actor said he drank over a bottle of whisky a night and took cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, LSD, speed and cannabis, while writing in his autobiography That’s Life, So It Is. Of his friendship with Katie Price, he writes: “I had always got on well with her, although we had more often than not been three sheets to the wind, at 3am, under the influence of anything that we had got our hands on!
“I have always had a soft spot for Pricey. I’ve always felt that she has been let down by friends and boyfriends alike.”
Charlie, 65, says he was introduced to “most drugs” and preferred cocaine and speed because “I wanted to be bouncing off the walls”. Of his early acting career, he says: “Drugs were everywhere.
"Every weekend I’d travel back to London on the last fast service to Euston and end up in some strange venue and party the whole night through with bags of speed and anything else we could get our hands on. Vast amounts of cocaine was available and clearly everyone, including myself, had partaken.”
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He describes his first acid trip as “a particularly brilliant adventure” but was violently sick after “chasing the dragon” and never did it again. Charlie says he partied with fellow star Phil Middlemiss during his early years on Corrie.
He writes: “The cardinal rule was never to be late. Especially if you were party animals like Philip and myself. I was constantly out all night on the lash. Life was a complete joy, as long as I could carry on without a care in the world. Cocaine was everywhere and we took full advantage of its availability.”
A little later, he recalls: “My drinking had become very heavy. I never drank during the day but at night I was drinking over a bottle of whiskey. If there was anything else around I would buy it.”
Throughout the 1990s, joining the soap in 1989, Northern Irish Charlie starred as Big Jim in more than 1,000 episodes of Corrie. The three-times-married actor – wed to Debbie Stanley – told in October how his late second wife Leslie Bond nearly drove him to suicide by years of physical abuse.
And he once admitted his regret after putting partying before daughter Laura, now 36.
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