Mandy Rice-Davies, a former model and the woman at the center of one of Britain's biggest political sex scandals, died Thursday at age 70 after a short battle with cancer.
Rice-Davies' name became known country-wide in 1963 (during the Cold War) when it was revealed that a government minister, John Profumo, had shared a mistress, Christine Keeler, with a Soviet defense attaché, Yevgeny Ivanov, reported The Associated Press. Rice Davies was brought into the mix because she was also sleeping with a Soviet naval attache.
She and Keeler were friends and roommates during the scandal that raised rocked the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan and caused questions to surface about the country's national security.
The scandal, known in Britain as the Profumo scandal, caused Profumo to resign. He later died in 2006.
"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," Rice-Davies once said, according to AP.
In 1963 the country's view on sex was much more reserved than it is today. Rice-Davies summed up the issue for AP last year, saying, "In those days, there were good girls and there were bad girls. Good girls didn't have any sex at all, and bad girls had a bit."
The Profumo scandal overshadowed her life in the years after it surfaced when she was only 19-years-old. The scandal resurfaced again in 1989 with the movie "Scandal," which starred Joanne Whalley as Keeler, Ian McKellen as Profumo and Bridget Fonda as Rice-Davies, reported AP.
