Mandy Rice-Davies - one of the women at the centre of the Profumo affair which rocked Harold Macmillan's Tory government in the 1960s - has died aged 70.

A spokesman for 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."

The lurid disclosures of high-society sex parties and claims that the Secretary of State for War John Profumo had shared a mistress with a Russian defence attache enthralled and scandalised early 1960s Britain.

Miss Rice-Davies, a nightclub dancer, gained notoriety when in the witness box of the Old Bailey she dismissed a denial by Lord Astor that he had slept with her, saying: "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

Her insouciant response seemed to encapsulate a new lack of deference to the old order as the country emerged from the austerity of the immediate post war years.

Her claim to have had an affair with the peer - whose mansion at Cliveden was the setting for the scandal - was denied many years later by his wife, but she always stuck to her story.

"What was Bill (Lord Astor) doing? I didn't seduce Bill. I didn't even flutter an eyelash at him. I wasn't a temptress. He seduced me. In those days women did not leap upon men," she said.