Mandy Rice-Davies, a former nightclub dancer and model who achieved notoriety in 1963 in one of Britain’s most spectacular Cold War sex scandals, died on Thursday. She was 70.
Her publicist said in a statement confirming the death that Rice-Davies had endured a “short battle with cancer.” The statement did not say where she died.
In later years, Rice-Davies became a businesswoman and a writer, and was known by her married name, Marilyn Foreman.
Photo: AFP
However, Britons more widely remember her for making headlines in what was called the Profumo affair — revelations that a government minister, John Profumo, had shared a mistress, Christine Keeler, with a Soviet defense attache, Yevgeny Ivanov.
The scandal raised questions about national security and rocked the Conservative government of then-British prime minister Harold Macmillan.
Rice-Davies shared lodgings with Keeler, but never met Profumo, who died in 2006.
In March 1963, Profumo went before parliament to deny any “impropriety whatsoever” with Keeler. However, he resigned three months later as details of the relationship emerged, forcing him to admit that he had lied to parliament.
Details of the scandal were revealed in court hearings at the trial of Stephen Ward, an osteopath, who had introduced Profumo and Keeler at a party at the Berkshire country home of aristocrat Lord Astor. Ward took a drug overdose just before he was found guilty on two counts of living off immoral earnings and died days later.
His story was the basis of a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, titled simply Stephen Ward, that opened in London late last year and closed after only a few months. Rice-Davies appeared in publicity photographs with Lloyd Webber and Charlotte Blackledge, who played her in the show.
The affair was also the basis of 1989 film Scandal, in which Bridget Fonda played Rice-Davies.
During court hearings in 1963, the public learned of what seemed to be lurid activities involving aristocrats, government officials, diplomats, spies and call girls.
During the hearings, Rice-Davies gained renown for a pithy response to being told that Lord Astor had denied he had slept with her.
“Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?” she said, according to one account.
Rice-Davies stuck to her account of the relationship with Lord Astor despite subsequent denials by his family.
“The only reason I still want to talk about it is that I have to fight the misconception that I was a prostitute,” she said at one point, according to the news agency The Press Association. “I don’t want that to be passed on to my grandchildren. There is still a stigma.”
She also said that the era’s renown for unbridled licentiousness was exaggerated.
“In those days, there were good girls and there were bad girls,” she told The Associated Press last year. “Good girls didn’t have any sex at all, and bad girls had a bit.”
Born in Llanelli, Wales, on Oct. 21, 1944, Rice-Davies spent part of her early years in the English Midlands.
In 1988, she married Ken Foreman, who survives her.
“My life has been one long descent into respectability,” she was widely reported as saying.
Besides her husband, she is survived by a daughter, Dana.
“Mandy was enormously well-read and intelligent,” Lloyd Webber said in a statement on Friday. “I will always remember discussing with her over dinner subjects as varied as Thomas Cromwell’s dissolution of the monasteries and the influence of the artist Stanley Spencer on Lucian Freud. With a different throw of the dice, Mandy might have been head of the Royal Academy, or even running the country.”
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