Mandy Rice-Davies was a charismatic model and showgirl who was celebrated for her role in the Profumo sex scandal which rocked the British establishment in the 1960s.

She died yesterday aged 70. She stole the show in 1963 at the height of the Profumo affair when she appeared as a witness in a court case involving Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who had introduced the Conservative Minister of War, John Profumo, to the call girl Christine Keeler. Her role in the Profumo affair was, in fact, a fairly minor one. As friend and flatmate of Christine Keeler, who was sleeping alternately with Profumo and with the Soviet naval attaché Yevgeny Ivanov, she was called to give evidence when Ward was prosecuted on charges of living off immoral earnings (she was said to have been in a chain of call girls run by Ward, which included Keeler). Ward, as it transpired, committed suicide before sentence was passed, but the real star of the show was Mandy Rice-Davies.

Her reply to counsel when told that another participant in the drama, Lord Astor, had denied having slept with her - "Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?" - entered the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and has been much plagiarised ever since.

While Keeler was the more beautiful of the two girls, Mandy was by a long chalk the more resilient and streetwise. With her heavily mascara'd eyes, pouting lips and bouffant fair hair piled and lacquered in place, she seemed to enjoy the limelight and emerged from the scandal a winner.

Her unerring instinct for the perfect sound bite, 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.

She was born Marilyn Rice-Davies at Pontyates near Llanelli, Wales, on October 21 1944, the daughter of a former medical student turned police officer and finally technologist for Dunlop; her mother was a Welsh girl from the Rhondda Valley.

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

On her first day in London, armed with just £35, she answered an advertisement placed by Murray's Cabaret Club, Soho, for dancers.

It was there that she met Keeler, and the two women briefly shared a flat together. Through Keeler she met Ward (with whom she had an affair), and was soon circulating in smart London society, though, like Keeler, she always denied being a prostitute.

"We were just young girls in search of a good time," she told an interviewer on Radio 4 last year. On another occasion she observed: "I was certainly game, but I wasn't on it."

When Ward was arrested and charged with living off immoral earnings, initially Rice-Davies refused to talk to the police. But once the trial got under way, she seemed rather to relish the publicity. In 1988, she married, thirdly, Ken Foreman, the chairman of Attwoods waste disposal group. She and her husband led a luxurious and peripatetic life between their houses in Virginia Water, Surrey, Miami and the Bahamas.

Rice-Davies's autobiography, 'Mandy', was published in 1980. She also wrote several works of romantic fiction and cookery books.

Reflecting on her scandalous past in later life, she remarked: "I have never been sorry for myself. I'm of the existential school. I did it and that's it."

She is survived by her husband and her daughter, Dana.

(© Daily Telegraph London)

Irish Independent