Mandy Rice-Davies
showgirl and nightclub owner
born October 21 1944
died December 18 2014
Mandy Rice-Davies, who has died aged 70, sprang to instant notoriety aged 18, when she appeared as a witness in the trial of Stephen Ward, the well-connected osteopath at the centre of the Profumo affair.
The Profumo scandal not only destroyed the credibility of Harold Macmillan's government but set the tone for much of the anti-establishment sentiment of the 1960s. It was a gift for the satirists of Private Eye and Peter Cook's Establishment Club, which had set up just a couple of years before, but was seized upon just as eagerly by the mainstream press.
The revelation that Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies's former flatmate, had been sleeping with both the Conservative Minister of War, John Profumo, and a Soviet naval attaché called Yevgeny Ivanov at the height of the Cold War cost Profumo his job. It also dragged into the spotlight the louche milieu around Ward, which included prominent figures such as the slum landlord Peter Rachman, and aristocrats such as Lord Dudley and Lord Astor, whose house at Cliveden was said to have been the scene of debauched parties.
When the prosecuting counsel in Ward's trial, for living off immoral earnings, put it to Mandy Rice-Davies that the peer denied it all, her reply - "He would, wouldn't he?" - made it on to the front pages of the papers, and subsequently into the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (in which she is described as an "English courtesan"). This line, and her subsequent readiness to embrace the limelight, fixed her forever in the public imagination, though her involvement with the Profumo scandal was actually relatively minor.
Ward committed suicide before the conclusion of his trial, and has subsequently been portrayed by many as a scapegoat for the hypocrisy of the British establishment of the time. For their part, both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies denied being part of a call-girl ring; as Mandy Rice-Davies put it, in an interview years afterwards, "I was certainly game, but I wasn't on it."
She was born Marilyn Rice-Davies on October 21 1944 near Llanelli, but grew up in Solihull in Birmingham. Her father was a police officer, and then a rubber technician at Dunlop, and she enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing; she had a pony and early ambitions to become a missionary. But she was quick to develop physically, and soon switched her affections, and ambitions, towards boys, clothes and make-up and left school at 15 for a job with a department store.
After some modelling there, she got a bit part in the 1960 film Make Mine Mink with Terry-Thomas and Hattie Jacques, and a modelling job lounging across the bonnet of the newly launched Mini at the London Motor Show. Having been refused permission to move to London by her father, she set off anyway, starting as a dancer at Murray's Cabaret Club.
There she met Christine Keeler, whom she at first disliked, but with whom she soon shared a flat, and by whom she was introduced to Stephen Ward. They had a brief affair, but Mandy Rice-Davies, who had by then also had flings with Lord Dudley and the insurance swindler "Doctor" Emil Savundra, instead moved in with Peter Rachman, the unscrupulous landlord who controlled much of Notting Hill. She was still just 16.
After he died of a heart attack, she moved back in with Ward for several months, during which time she had affairs with Lord Astor and the American actor Douglas Fairbanks, Junior. She had various modelling jobs, singing in a Pepsodent advert and promoting Wall's 77 ice cream.
After shots were fired at Ward's flat by a West Indian drug dealer called Johnny Edgecombe, while both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were present, the Profumo affair gradually came to light, and Ward was subsequently arrested.
After the trial, Mandy Rice-Davies capitalised on her notoriety with newspaper interviews, and was offered a singing job at a German cabaret club. She spent some time there, with a succession of wealthy men, and released an EP before moving to Spain and then, at 21, settling in Israel, where she married Rafael Shaul and converted to Judaism.
She and her husband set up a chain of restaurants and discotheques, including Mandy's, which became a fashionable venue in Tel Aviv. After the birth of their daughter Dana, the marriage broke up, and Mandy Rice-Davies moved to Spain, though she retained business interests in Israel. A number of affairs with rich men followed, as well as a brief marriage, in 1978, to Jean-Charles Lefevre, a French restaurateur.
In 1980 she returned to Britain for the sake of her daughter's education, published an autobiography, Mandy, and launched a career as an actress. She appeared in Tom Stoppard's Dirty Linen (tour, 1981) and in the long-running farce No Sex, Please, We're British in the West End. She even had a stab at Shakespeare, playing Lady Capulet.
She had some minor film roles, including Absolute Beginners (1986) but was mostly in the public eye on television chat shows and newspaper articles promoting herself; she wrote cookery books and a novel, The Scarlet Thread (1989).
She married her third husband, Ken Foreman, a waste management tycoon, in 1988; they divided their time between homes at Virginia Water in Surrey, Miami and the Bahamas. He and her daughter survive her.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article