Mandy Rice-Davies, famous for her role in the 1960s Profumo affair that almost toppled the British government in 1963, has died at the age of 70.
A statement from the Hackford Jones PR agency said: “It is with deep sadness that the family of Marilyn Foreman, also known as Mandy Rice-Davies, have confirmed that she passed away yesterday evening after a short battle with cancer.
“They have asked for their privacy to be respected and no further comment will be made.”
Rice-Davies, then a night-club dancer, was responsible for one of the best-known quotations of modern time: “He would, wouldn’t he?”, made during the Old Bailey trial of Stephen Ward, an osteopath charged with living off the immoral earnings of Christine Keeler and her friend Rice-Davies.
Rice-Davies’ comment came when she was asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
Keeler had had an affair with the then war secretary John Profumo and had also had sex with the Soviet naval attache in London who was a spy. Profumo’s disgrace followed a false denial that he had slept with Keeler, and the resulting furore probably played a part in the Conservatives’ defeat at the general election the following year.
Rice-Davies remained a public figure after the scandal, singing and acting, and earlier this year added her voice to claims that Ward had been made a scapegoat in the affair. He killed himself at the flat of a London friend after he was found guilty.
Rice-Davies was born in Wales in 1944. She later said that at school she won so many prizes that she had to give some of them back to give the other children a chance. She said her twin loves when she was young were her Welsh mountain pony, Laddie, and the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer. “I wanted to hug lepers, hug trees and to join him if I could. But then I did some research and changed my mind.”
She left school without qualifications and took a job in the china department at Marshall & Snelgrove in Birmingham, modelling at the store during teatime. She then moved to London, where she got a job as a dancer at Murray’s cabaret club in Soho, where she began mixing with the rich and famous.
The Earl of Dudley, one of Murray’s oldest clients, took such a shine to Rice-Davies, who by 17 had had her first offer of marriage. “I could have been a dowager duchess by the time I was 22,” she said.
She also began her association with Keeler, a fellow dancer, and with Ward, leading to high society sex parties, particularly at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire mansion of the Astors.
She said later: “As soon as I realised that the whole thing was about to blow up, I went and told my parents absolutely everything that could possibly come out, and they were very supportive. Looking back on it, I was remarkably naive.”
Later, she lived with notorious landlord Peter Rachman for two years. Rachman died soon after they split up.
After the Ward trial, she accepted an offer to sing in a cabaret in Germany, and met a half-French, half-Italian baron, Pierre Cevello.
She moved to Spain and then to Israel, still singing in cabaret, marrying a businessman, Rafael Shaul, running restaurants with him, a dress factory and she acted in a Hebrew theatre.
They had a daughter, Dana, but after ten years they divorced. She then married a Frenchman called Jean Charles - for about a week, she claimed.
Soon afterwards she met her third husband, British businessman Ken Foreman, marrying on a private island and living on Grove Isle, Miami. They had other homes in the Bahamas and Virginia Water, Surrey.
After seeing Edward Fox starring as Harold Macmillan in the play Letter of Resignation, which focused on the Profumo scandal, in 1999, she said: “We left in frustration at the end of the first act, because I couldn’t understand a word he was saying,” she said.
She was to say later: “If I could live my life over, I would wish 1963 had not existed. The only reason I still want to talk about it is that I have to fight the misconception that I was a prostitute. I don’t want that to be passed on to my grandchildren. There is still a stigma.”
She also insisted she had no secrets to take to the grave. “Everything is out. That is why I have no concerns whatsoever about anything.”
