British Secretary of State for War John Profumo (1915-2006), who was forced to resign over his affair with Christine Keeler. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

London: 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 family said Marilyn Foreman, also known as Mandy Rice-Davies, had died on Thursday evening after a short battle with cancer.

"They have asked for their privacy to be respected and no further comment will be made," he said.

Mandy Rice-Davies, then 18, who gave evidence at a trial at the Old Bailey.

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.

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Rice-Davies, a nightclub dancer, gained notoriety for the comment she made in the witness box during the Old Bailey trial of society osteopath and procurer of women Dr Stephen Ward.

He was charged with living off the immoral earnings of both Rice-Davies and Keeler. When she was told that Lord Astor had denied her claims that he had slept with her, Rice-Davies astonished the court by famously saying: "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

An English Affair by Richard Davenport-Hine.

It was a phrase which found its way into many dictionaries of quotations.

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 postwar years.

Dr Ward, who was found guilty, committed suicide at the Chelsea flat of a friend, on the eve of the jury returning its verdict.

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 had said.

Mandy Rice-Davies, a key figure alongside Christine Keeler in the Profumo scandal of 1963, played her unwitting part in an affair which contributed to the downfall of the Conservative government the following year.

But unlike Keeler, who afterwards slid into relative poverty and near obscurity, Rice-Davies, a vivacious and bubbly character, continued to enjoy the high life, dancing, writing and acting, and marrying wealthy men.

Mandy Rice-Davies was born in 1944 in Solihull to Welsh parents, who plainly found her something of a trial. She said that at school she won so many prizes that she had to give some of them back to give the other children a chance.

Her twin loves as a child were her Welsh mountain pony, Laddie (doing paper rounds to support him), and the medical missionary Albert Schweitzer. At the age of 12 she wanted to become a missionary.    

"I wanted to hug lepers, hug trees and to join him if I could. But then I did some research and changed my mind."

She left school without qualifications and took a part-time job in a department store in Birmingham, starting to model during tea-time at the store. But bored with this, she packed a suitcase and went to London.

Within a week, she got a job as a dancer at Murray's Cabaret Club in London's Soho, where she began mixing with the rich and famous - something she continued to do throughout her life.

The Earl of Dudley, one of Murray's oldest clients, took such a shine to Rice-Davies that by 17 she had had her first offer of marriage.    

"I could have been a dowager duchess by the time I was 22," she said.

She also began her association with Christine Keeler, a fellow dancer, and with Stephen Ward. It was this which was to catapult her into the sleazy but exciting world of high society sex parties, particularly at Cliveden, the fairy-tale Berkshire mansion of the Astors.

This was the scenario which led to the disgrace and downfall of John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, who falsely denied in the Commons that he had slept with Christine Keeler.

The Ward trial was to make Rice-Davies a household name.

As the years rolled by, Rice-Davies was to appear in a Tom Stoppard play and in films. After the Ward trial, she accepted an offer to sing in a cabaret in Germany, and found solace with a half-French, half-Italian baron named Pierre Cevello.

From Germany, she moved on to Spain and then to Israel, still singing in cabaret. She married an Israeli businessman, Rafael Shaul, ran a chain of restaurants with him, a dress factory and acted in a Hebrew theatre.

They had a daughter, Dana, but after 10 years they divorced. Then she married a Frenchman called Jean Charles - but only for about a week, she claimed.

Soon afterwards she met her third husband, British businessman Ken Foreman and they married on a private island and lived on Grove Isle, a salubrious part of Miami.

She was to say later: "If I could live my life over, I would wish 1963 had not existed. The only reason I still want to talk about it is that I have to fight the misconception that I was a prostitute. I don't want that to be passed on to my grandchildren. There is still a stigma."

She also insisted there were no secrets which she would take to the grave.

"Everything is out. That is why I have no concerns whatsoever about anything."

PA