Mandy Rice-Davies was the star performer in the Profumo scandal and reinvented herself as a successful businesswoman
Mandy Rice-Davies, who has died aged 70, stole the show in 1963 at the height of the Profumo affair when she appeared as a witness in the court case involving Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who had introduced the Conservative Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, to Christine Keeler.
Mandy Rice-Davies’s 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 Christine Keeler).
Ward, as it transpired, committed suicide before sentence was passed, but the real star of the show was Mandy Rice-Davies. Her pert 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.
It was while she was ministering to the needs of Laddie that she had her first sexual encounter — with a local “maniac” who exposed himself to her when she was riding her bicycle. Even at the tender age of 13 Mandy showed a gutsy instinct for self-preservation. “He didn’t touch me,” she recalled, “but the minute he stopped my bicycle I knew what he was after so I hit him with my bucket which had bran mash in it.”
As a child she had been inspired by the story of the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer and, aged 12, decided that she too wanted to become a missionary and “hug lepers”. Deciding after further research that this was not as attractive an occupation as she had imagined, when she left school aged 15 she took a job as a sales assistant in the Birmingham store Marshall & Snelgrove. She began modelling there and was “discovered”. She was cast in the film Make Mine Mink with Terry-Thomas, draped herself over a Mini at the Motor Show, then, aged 16, ran away to London.
Mandy Rice-Davies in 1964
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 Christine Keeler, and the two women briefly shared a flat together. Through Christine Keeler she met Stephen Ward (with whom she had an affair), and was soon circulating in smart London society, though, like Christine 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.”
Within her first year in the capital, she claimed to have been proposed to by the ageing Lord Dudley; she had an affair with the fraudster Emil Savundra; and, still aged 16, became the mistress of Peter Rachman, the notorious slum landlord. Rachman called her “Choochi”, she called him “Chich”, and they lived together for two years. Despite the affectionate nature of their relationship, he never told her he had a wife. This created difficulties after his death from a heart attack in 1962 when his wife, Audrey, reclaimed the Jaguar he had given his 16-year-old mistress.
In between these amorous encounters, with that irrepressible hope of better things to come that had brought her to London, Mandy Rice-Davies continued to pursue a career as a model and actress. She appeared in advertisements for Pepsodent, singing “You’ll wonder where the yellow went”, and for Pepsi, although she always refused to allow herself to be photographed in the nude on the ground that “You never know, you might become prime minister.”
After Rachman’s death, Mandy Rice-Davies moved back to Stephen Ward’s house in Wimpole Mews, where within weeks she had succumbed to the blandishments of Lord Astor, to whom she had been introduced by Ward some two years previously and who had paid the rent for the flat which she and Christine Keeler had shared in Comeragh Road.
When Stephen Ward was arrested and charged with living off immoral earnings, initially Mandy Rice-Davies refused to talk to the police. But once the trial got under way, she seemed rather to relish the publicity. Her sally to some American journalists “Call me Lady Hamilton” endeared her briefly to newspapers in three continents; and when she revealed that she had been the mistress of Peter Rachman, not to mention Lord Dudley, she became many a middle-aged man’s fantasy.
Mandy Rice-Davies outside the Old Bailey during Stephen Ward's trial,1963
After the trial ended, Mandy 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 Baroness Cervello against her husband Baron Cervello), before moving to Spain and then to Israel where, aged just 21, she married Rafael Shaul, a former El Al steward. She learnt Hebrew and took six years of instruction before converting to Judaism.
Together, she and her new husband built up a chain of restaurants and opened two nightclubs, including Mandy’s, a fashionable establishment in Tel Aviv; she also acted in Israeli theatre. During the Six Day War she was rumoured to have worked as a volunteer for the Israeli Red Cross, but when the writer Auberon Waugh went to Israel to visit her, he discovered she had in fact been working in her nightclub at the time, although she was “happy to jump into nurse’s uniform and pose for photographs with the wounded soldiers”.
She and her husband parted company after the birth of their daughter, and Mandy Rice-Davies subsequently moved to Spain, though she retained a string of business interests in Israel and elsewhere. After her divorce, she had as lovers an Argentine consul, a rich Swiss businessman and an even richer Canadian. In 1978 she married a Frenchman, Jean-Charles Lefevre, a restaurant owner, but the marriage lasted less than a year and she returned to Britain.
In 1981 she played Maddy Gotobed in a touring production of Tom Stoppard’s Dirty Linen and appeared in the long-running West End production No Sex Please, We’re British. She was in A Bedful of Foreigners for 10 months and acted the part of Lady Capulet in Romeo and Juliet at the Ludlow Festival. In 2013 she was involved in the development of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Stephen Ward the Musical, in which she was played by Charlotte Blackledge.
Her film credits include Nana (1982), an X-rated piece of erotica based on Emile Zola’s book of the same name. She appeared on numerous television chat shows, took small parts in Heart of the Country and Chance in a Million (both BBC series) and made a guest appearance on Absolutely Fabulous.
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. An occasional holiday companion was Margaret Thatcher late in her life with her husband, Denis, who knew Foreman through business.
Mandy 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.
Mandy Rice-Davies, born October 21 1944, died December 18 201
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