Socialite

Born: December 23 1971;

Died: February 8 2017

TARA Palmer-Tomkinson, who has died aged 45, was a notorious socialite, friend of royalty and one of the first to benefit from the rise of a different kind of celebrity in the 1990s. A new era in which you did not necessarily have to do anything significant to be famous was dawning, and Palmer-Tomkinson, or TPT to her friends, was at its forefront, paving the way for today's celebrity reality stars.

Her notoriety peaked in the mid 1990s when she was photographed kissing Prince Charles on the ski slopes of Klosters in 1995. The following year she and the oil heiress Normandie Keith appeared on the front cover of Tatler, labelled It Girls. What did the It Girl do? She partied, she drank and did drugs, she went on holiday, she spent a lot of money and the tabloids wrote about it.

In later years, as she tired of the round of parties and envied friends and family with more settled lives, Palmer-Tomkinson won redemption of sorts when she finished a runner-up in the ITV reality series I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, attracting support and sympathy for her frank discussion of her personal problems and drugs habits. She also turned to writing, producing two chick-lit novels and launched her own fashion label.

She had shown promising talent in other areas too when she was young, particularly the piano, but it was her presence on the London party scene in the 1990s and 2000s that made her famous, as well as her cocaine addiction.

The hard partying occasionally made her persona non grata, but Palmer-Tomkinson and her family remained close friends of the Royal Family and she attended the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011.

She also continued to make appearances on television including celebrity specials of Blind Date and A Place In The Sun and Red Nose Day, although a tired and confused appearance on The Frank Skinner Show in 1999 confirmed many people's suspicions that her life was coming off the rails. Later the same year, she was in rehab.

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was born in 1971 to the landowner and former Olympic skier Charles Palmer-Tomkinson and his wife Patricia, a former model. Charles had represented Britain in the 1964 Winter Olympics and was a skiing companion of Prince Charles. Patricia was seriously injured in 1988 when a party including her and the Prince was hit by an avalanche that killed the Queen's former equerry, Major Hugh Lindsay.

Palmer-Tomkinson grew up on her parents' estate in Hampshire and boarded at Sherborne School for Girls in Dorset, where she had a generally miserable time.

She had aspirations from a young age to be a concert pianist and although she never made a career of it, she performed at venues including the Royal Albert Hall and the Royal Festival Hall. Another early unfulfilled ambition was to become a vet.

After school, she did a drama course and the odd bit of modelling but by the time of the Tatler cover she was a full-time party girl.

She was generally unapologetic about her life, although she did have regrets over her drug use - a reported £400-a-day cocaine habit - for which she went into a rehab facility in America in 1999. She also underwent septum reconstruction surgery in 2006.

In 2016 she said: "I definitely have regrets. I wish I had never touched half the stuff. But in the same way, I'm not going to sit there and feel ashamed for what I did, because I have had a life."

She added: "The things that mattered to me a long time ago don't matter anymore. What matters to me now is health. Because I've paid a price for my health, and I wish I had given up cigarettes a long time ago ... I've always been very health-conscious, but when you're 44, you don't wake up looking the same way."

As she approached 30, and at the end of her socialite streak, Palmer-Tomkinson admitted she envied the more structured lives of her sister Santa Montefiore, a renowned author, and her brother James.

She said: "Now I want a more conventional lifestyle. Unlike my brother and sister, whose lives had a pattern, I never knew where I'd be from one minute to the next. It was unsettling and it damn nearly killed me in the end."

In 2014 she said she had become a recluse after suffering a nervous breakdown and spoke about her battle with drug addiction. She broke down in tears as she recalled the night she nearly died from an overdose during her battle with cocaine addiction.

In January last year, Palmer-Tomkinson was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour and in November said that she had feared dying when doctors told her about the growth in her pituitary gland. She was also suffering with an auto-immune disease which had caused tiredness, joint pain and acute anaemia.

Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was a prevalent charity supporter and backed several organisations, including Scottish autism charity Speur Ghlan.

She is survived by her parents, Charles and Patricia, brother James and sister Santa.