I’VE
LEFT THE UNITED STATES FOR GOOD
by David McCrindell
National Enquirer
February 28, 1971
Recently remarried in London, actress Lee Remick tells why:
"I see no reason to live in America,” said movie star Lee Remick after her quiet, civil-office wedding in London to English film director William “Kip” Gowans. “I’ve left the United States for good. I’m going to stay in England,” she told The Enquirer in an exclusive interview.
“England is much more fun and better living. People are gentler and more concerned. I lived most of my life in New York and towards the end it was not very pleasant there. It is such a violent city. People are tense and angry.
“You feel anger everywhere in New York. London, on the other hand, is peaceful and nonviolent.”
Relaxing in her 10-room house in the plush London suburb of St. John’s Wood. Lee talked about her wedding last December 18 and said:
“We had a nice quiet wedding without any fuss because that’s how we like to do things. Our life is our own and although I have a following because of my career as an actress, we feel that our private life is our own and when we do something we don’t want the whole world to know about it.”
Lee, a Boston-born, upper crust beauty, has been living in England since 1969, when she divorced her first husband, William Colleran after 12 years of marriage. They had two children, Katherine Lee, now 13, and Matthew, now 9. Gowans was divorced by his first wife, actress Valerie Gearon, last June.
“My children are here with me and attend a small, private school,” Lee said.
“I can put my daughter into a taxi and send her alone to a party and be reasonably sure no one is going to attack her or chop her to pieces.”
“In New York, it is not like that. New York makes parents very anxious for their children. They cannot give their children freedom.”
Lee was born Dec. 14, 1935, the daughter of Frank Remick, a well-to-do Quincy, Mass., department store owner, and actress Patricia Remick.
Her parents were divorced when she was seven and she and her brother Bruce, now a researcher on a Puerto Rican sugar plantation, went to live with their mother in New York.
She was raised in an atmosphere of culture, studying ballet, attending the theater and visiting museums. Lee graduated from Miss Hewitt’s Classes (now The Hewitt School), an exclusive private school in New York City, and briefly attended Barnard College.
She made her Broadway debut while still in high school. In 1959 she became a movie star with her performance in Anatomy of a Murder.
In a 1961 interview, Lee told Hollywood writer Joe Hyams, “I’m really a housewife who is incidentally an actress.”
In her recent interview with The Enquirer in London, Lee made it clear she was not giving up her career to be a housewife.
She said: “I have no intention of retiring from acting. In fact, life will go on the same as before except that Kip and I are now married. We are both very happy now that we are married and life is fine.”
“We are going to live in London. It’s quiet and good and there are few worries. All we both want to do is settle down into a nice quiet family and stay that way.”
