Profumo scandal star Mandy Rice-Davies dies at the age of 70

The woman who stole the show in Britain' s Profumo affair has died at the age of 70.

At the height of the scandal in 1963, Mandy Rice-Davies appeared as a witness in the trial of Stephen Ward, a society osteopath who had introduced the Conservative secretary of state for war, John Profumo, to call girl Christine Keeler.

Rice-Davies's role in the Profumo affair was, in fact, a fairly minor one. As a friend and flatmate of Keeler, who was sleeping alternately with Profumo and with Soviet naval attaché Yevgeny Ivanov, she gave evidence when Ward was prosecuted on charges of living off immoral earnings.

She was said to be in a chain of call girls run by Ward, who would commit suicide before sentence was passed.

Rice-Davies was the star of the show. Her pert reply when told that another participant in the drama, Lord Astor, denied having slept with her - "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?" - entered the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and has been much used ever since.

With her heavily mascara'd eyes, pouting lips and bouffant blonde hair lacquered in place, Rice-Davies seemed to enjoy the limelight .

Her unerring instinct for the perfect soundbite, her saucy innuendoes and good head for business enabled her to build her sex-laden notoriety into a lucrative career.

With what she described as a "natural aversion to unhappiness", she emerged emotionally unscathed but financially better off from a chain of marriages and affairs, and became a novelist, actress and successful businesswoman.

Brought up in the prosperous Birmingham suburb of Solihull, as a child she sang in the church choir and did paper rounds to raise money to feed her beloved Welsh mountain pony, Laddie.

She left school at the age of 15 and took a job as a sales assistant . She began modelling and was "discovered". She was cast in a film, draped herself over a Mini at a motor show, then, at 16, ran away to London.

On her first day in the city she answered an advert placed by a Soho club for dancers.

It was there that she met Keeler, and the two women briefly shared a flat.

Through Keeler she met Ward (with whom she had an affair), and was soon circulating in smart London society, although, like Keeler, she always denied being a prostitute.

"We were just young girls in search of a good time," she told a radio interviewer last year. On another occasion she observed: "I was certainly game, but I wasn't on it."

After the trial ended, Rice-Davies accepted an invitation to be a cabaret singer in Germany, where she found solace with a new love (in 1966 she was cited in a divorce case by a Baroness Cervello against her husband Baron Cervello), before moving to Spain, then to Israel, where, aged just 21, she married Rafael Shaul, a former El Al steward.

Together, she and her new husband built a chain of restaurants and opened a nightclub in Tel Aviv.

Rice-Davies, who is survived by her daughter, married twice more and notched up acting credits including in the long-running West End production, No Sex Please, We're British.

- © The Daily Telegraph, London

19-12-2014