Kelly LeBrock: 'I Became a Hermit'
Following her bitter divorce from action star Steven Seagal, actress Kelly LeBrock recently revealed that she was too afraid to leave her home.
"I became a hermit," the 53-year-old star of the 1980s films "Woman in Red" and "Weird Science" told the U.K.'s Daily Mail.
"When I split with Steven, the divorce was very ugly, and details of the case were on the evening news," she said. "I didn't want my kids seeing it, so I simply got rid of the TV. I moved my kids out of L.A. so they could grow up with real people - the kids of gas pump attendants, plumbers and real family people."
After the divorce in 1996, LeBrock gave up her life in Beverly Hills for a more secluded one in the country on a sprawling ranch in Santa Barbara, Calif.
"I feared everything and didn't want to leave the house," LeBrock told the newspaper.
LeBrock lives in a single-story farmhouse, where she grows her own vegetables, makes her own cheese and yogurt, and spends evenings riding her horse, Kiwi.
"It's bloody exhausting!" she said about her life now. "To work the land full time keeps me so fit that I haven't worked out in seven years. I clean the pool myself, muck out the pigs and the horses."
LeBrock's current life looks nothing like her past.
At 15, she began modeling and became one of the top models in the 1970s, appearing in Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. By 1984, she married aspiring movie producer Victor Drai, who cast her in the title role of "Woman in Red" opposite Gene Wilder. The film earned an Academy Award and made a star of LeBrock, who, in the film, recreated Marilyn Monroe's iconic scene standing atop an air vent as her red dress billowed upward.
After her marriage to Drai ended in 1986, LeBrock was introduced to Seagal, now 61, a year later.
"He spoke fluent Japanese and he could do acupuncture, chiropractics, sang, played guitar and drums, and could draw," she told the Daily Mail. "There seemed to be nothing he couldn't do. He was an all-round Renaissance man and I was instantly attracted to him."
But their marriage was stormy. LeBrock said she stayed with the action hero for nine years because of their three children before finally calling it quits.
She's currently writing a memoir in which, she said, "the truth will finally come out," and she is preparing to make a return to Hollywood.