Of the many characters caught up in the 1960s sex and spying saga of the Profumo scandal, Mandy Rice-Davies, who has died aged 70 of cancer, managed to turn the celebrity that the whole affair brought to best effect. While others lost their reputations and jobs – and her friend the society osteopath Stephen Ward lost his life – Rice-Davies traded on the publicity to work as a singer, an actor, a nightclub owner and a novelist before settling down to comfortable life in Florida and London with her third husband, the businessman Ken Foreman.
She was always happy to step vivaciously back into the spotlight to relive her past. When Andrew Lloyd Webber announced plans in 2012 to stage a West End musical based on Ward’s life, Rice-Davies was initially privately sceptical but soon became one of his closest collaborators and a very public champion of the show.
Continue reading...