1.
Angela Lansbury saved her kids from following deadly cult leader Charles Manson.
So, Angela decided the best thing for her family to do was remove themselves from that environment and the bad influences. Angela, her husband Peter Shaw, and their kids moved to Ireland. She refused acting gigs for a year to tend to her family. With her support, a fresh start, and the help from doctors, Angela was able to keep her kids safe.
2.
At the young age of 5, Tina Fey was slashed in the face by a stranger who approached her while she was playing in her front yard in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. She has a scar that stretches from under her lip to her cheek.
“It’s impossible to talk about it without somehow seemingly exploiting it and glorifying it,” Tina said in a 2008 Vanity Fair interview, via People.
3.
The Princess Diaries star Heather Matarazzo had a scheduled meeting at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. She missed the meeting because she overslept.
“14 years ago today, I had a meeting at World Trade Center 1, 15th floor at 9 AM,” she wrote on Facebook. “My alarm didn’t go off.”
4.
Charlize Theron and her mother hid in her bedroom as her father, who “was an alcoholic,” shot at them through the door. Her mother ultimately killed him in self-defense.
“My father was a very sick man,” Charlize told NPR. “My father was an alcoholic all my life. I only knew him one way and that was as an alcoholic. And South Africa at that time was not necessarily a place where there was any – you didn’t have access to any kind of support group where you could even acknowledge that this was a problem or go and find help. Our culture at the time was very much thought of like, well, this is what men do. Men drink. And the day-to-day unpredictability of living with an addict is what is, I think, the thing that you sit with and have kind of embedded in your body for the rest of your life more than just this one event of, you know, what happened one night.”
5.
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Lisa Rinna revealed her mom, Lois Rinna, was kidnapped and stabbed by the Trailside Serial Killer David Carpenter. David terrorized San Francisco in the 1980s, known for killing, kidnapping, and raping people on hiking trails.
“A few years before I was born my mom was attacked by a man that she worked with,” Lisa revealed in a 2019 episode of the popular Bravo series. “He picked her up at the bus stop and then all of sudden he started to drive her down this really deserted road.”
6.
Adam DeVine was hit by a cement truck when he was 11, which launched him 500 feet from the accident. He would ultimately have to undergo 25 surgeries because of it.
“I was hit by a cement truck,” Adam said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “We were gonna go get candy and also rip pages out of Penthouse. That was a real agenda.”
7.
Supermodel Petra Nemcova and her boyfriend, photographer Simon Atlee, were on a dream vacation in Thailand in 2004, when the deadly Indian Ocean tsunami swept them away.
Petra survived by clinging on to the top of a palm tree for nearly eight hours. Simon was swept away, screaming her name, and ultimately did not survive. “I went into this stillness, into almost like a meditative state, because I knew if I start panicking, you lose more energy,” Petra told Good Morning America. “And I needed all my energy to keep alive.”
8.
In 2004, while filming the BBC mini-series To the Ends of the Earth in South Africa, Benedict Cumberbatch and his two costars, Theo Landey and Denise Black, were held at gunpoint.
After coming from a scuba-diving trip, the three were stopped by six armed men. The robbers forced them into a car after taking their cell phones and credit cards.
9.
While touring New South Wales, Australia, supermodel Helena Christensen and her friend were almost victims of Ivan Milat, the Backpacker Murderer.
Late at night this guy was just slowly driving behind us, then he stopped his car, jumped out and started following us,” Helena told the Sun.
“I was actually drowning,” she said. “Everyone thought I was acting fabulously…no one realized I was actually struggling.”
11.
Leonardo DiCaprio was face-to-face with a great white shark while diving in South Africa.
“A great white jumped into my cage when I was diving in South Africa,” Leo told Wired. “Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at me…I sort of fell down to the bottom [of the cage] and tried to lie flat.”
Have you ever cheated death or know of another celeb story that fits this category? Let me know in the comments!
