Lost Star Slams Britain  4/11/06

Lost star Naveen Andrews has slammed his native Britain as "bloody awful" and "small-minded", and insists he'll never return to live there.

Andrews, of Indian ancestry, was raised in London but moved to Los Angeles after falling in love with Drowning on Dry Land co-star Barbara Hershey in 1999.

And he is adamant he made the right move after years of alcoholism and racial prejudice left him disenchanted with England.

He says, "I'd basically, virtually, killed my career in England. I used to drink and do drugs and whatever, and in all fairness they (British producers) had to deal with that.

"I needed to be somewhere else, a street that didn't have a bloody pub on it.

Over here (America), that kind of excessive drinking is frowned upon. It's not good form to be walking around the streets drunk."

Andrews adds, "I never really felt like I had anywhere to call home because I didn't feel, even though I was born in England, I didn't think of London as home.

"It was bloody awful, to be honest. America has its problems but there's a sense of possibility here.

"In England, the class system is about a thousand years old and it's not going to change any time soon. You don't feel that here.

"Here, it's an economic class system. But it doesn't feel that you're going to be trapped in it forever, like you do in England. You feel like you can break out of it."