Tessa Dahl looks out from a page of the Daily Mail online. I had never heard of her until a few days ago when someone drew my attention to the story headed, “Why I’m leaving a life of addiction behind and becoming a nun…”, but most Britons probably know her as the daughter of the famous story writer Roald Dahl and Hollywood star Patricia Neal, a novelist in her own right, mother of cookery show personality and former model Sophie Dahl -- and a woman with a very chequered past.
The 53-year-old shows added signs of wear and tear from the alcoholism and cocaine habit she seems to have beaten, but you can see in the structure of her face the “sharp-cheeked beauty” the Mail refers to, and indeed, you can see her in her prime in another photo (right) taken with her father, who died in 1990. In those days she was a prominent London socialite with a couple of marriages behind her, but recently she has been living in the north-eastern United States where she set up house, near her mother, with some stray animals she rescued.
In the recent photo they have her posed with a Rosary in her hand outside a church. But for the past month or so she has been living at the Regina Laudis Abbey in Bethlehem, Connecticut, home of the Benedictine order that she is the process of entering. Helping the Lady Abbess clean the chapel with a mop and pail, making butter, spinning yarn, keeping to a daily schedule of prayer is a far cry from hobnobbing with the rich and famous as she has done for much of her life, but, she says, “It is saving my life.”
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