Michelle Pfieffer ‘brainwashed’ by ‘mindf**k’ cult who ‘eat air’ and say food is ‘heroin’

Hollywood stars have subscribed to some pretty out-there diets to look their best over the years but one may take the biscuit – quite literally.

Michelle Pfieffer says she was once brainwashed by a group who believed humans only need air and light to survive and food and water aren’t necessary.

Breathtakingly beautiful and unflappable on screen, it’s hard to imagine that the star was embroiled in a New Age “cult” in the early 1980s.

But the 20-year-old wannabe actress admitted she was coerced by a “very controlling” couple who practised Breatharianism.

READ MORE: Inside Michelle Pfeiffer’s life – X-rated snaps, career U-turn, ‘brainwashing’ cult

While Hollywood may be synonymous with peculiar eating regimes to stay stick thin, she was put “on a diet nobody can adhere to”.

It consisted of, well, nothing.

Michelle, who turned 65 on Saturday (April 29), told The Hollywood Reporter: “There was a lot of mind-f***ing and brainwashing.”

The Scarface star was even told that food was “more addictive than heroin”, and that it was possible to live forever from energy – or prana – in the air and sun’s rays.

She practised her hardcore fasting and mysticism to stay skinny and expand her spiritual horizons.

Michelle visited the unnamed couple three times a week, splashing a lot of money for little in return.

She told The Times: “I wasn’t living with them, but I was there a lot and they were always telling me I needed to come more.

“I had to pay for all the time I was there, so it was financially very draining.”

Her main goal was to go full Breatharian, falling deeper and deeper into the bizarre sect.

Whenever Michelle had fleeting doubts or wanted to leave, the couple persuaded her to stay, claiming she would die without them.

Whether it was blind luck or a fortunate twist of fate, she was saved when she met her future husband, Peter Horton.

The actor and director was cast in 1980 comedy Serial – about the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church cult.

He invited her along to a meeting with a real-life cult deprogrammer and “ex-Moonie”, where she listened in about the “psychological manipulation” that goes on.

When it clicked, Michelle said: “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m in a cult.’ It was like a light bulb went off, and I never went back.”

She married Horton in 1981, and landed her first big break in Grease 2 as Stephanie Zinone.

Their marriage lasted less than a decade, divorcing in 1988.

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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk