Sunday, 1 October 2006

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Leslie Grantham: I tried to kill myself after sex shame

EastEnders' Dirty Den says he wanted to die after being exposed as internet pervert

When it was revealed that Leslie Grantham, 59, had been uploading sordid images of himself on the internet, he tried to commit suicide three times.

The actor admits that in 2004 he had became hooked on internet porn and recorded the shocking pictures in his EastEnders dressing room.

'In between filming, I was emailing people, looking at the web and having sexy conversations with strangers,' he confesses in his new autobiography Life And Other Times.

When the obscene photographs appeared in newspapers – showing the naked soap star pleasuring himself – Leslie, a married dad of three, tried to take his own life by slashing his wrists and throat, hanging himself from a tree and wading into a lake weighed down with bricks.

But none of these attempts suceeded. 'Even at suicide I was crap,' he says.

In an interview with The News Of The World, Leslie says that his wife Jane was devastated about the revelations but kept the family together.

'Thank God I got caught,' he insists. 'What I did was a stupid, stupid thing.'