Former model and showgirl, raised in Wraysbury, Windsor and Maidenhead, S England, UK. She was involved in an affair with a Soviet naval attaché, Ivanov, and the Conservative cabinet minister, John Profumo, which led to Profumo's resignation from politics (1963), the prosecution of her patron Stephen Ward (d.1963) for living off the immoral earnings of Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies, and Ward's eventual suicide. Keeler served a prison sentence for related offences. In the late 1980s, her autobiography, and the film Scandal (1989), in which she collaborated, revived interest in the events and raised doubts about the validity of the charges made against her and Ward.
Christine Keeler (born February 22, 1942) was an English model and showgirl.
Born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, England, she was raised by her mother and stepfather in two converted railway carriages in the Berkshire village of Wraysbury.
That summer, Keeler left Wraysbury, staying briefly in Slough with a friend before heading for London. She introduced Keeler to the owner, Percy Murray, who hired her almost immediately as a topless showgirl.
The Profumo Affair
In July of 1961, Ward introduced her to John Profumo, the British Secretary of State for War, at a pool party at Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire mansion owned by Lord Astor. Profumo entered into an affair with Keeler, not suspecting that she was also sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché at the embassy of the Soviet Union.
The affair was terminated by the government’s Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brooke. On 9 August 1961 Profumo wrote to Keeler advising her he could no longer see her.
Among Keeler's collection of lovers were two West Indians - Aloysius ‘Lucky’ Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe. Gordon, with a previous criminal record, was infatuated with Keeler. Keeler alleged that he assaulted her in the street and held her captive for two days at one point.
Keeler eventually rejected Gordon's advances and bought a revolver to protect herself from him.
Edgecombe went into hiding from the police. Keeler changed her address to hide from Gordon. Edgecombe contacted Keeler to request her help in finding a solicitor before the police found him. Keeler refused to help as he had taken a new lover in the meantime.
In the early afternoon of 14 December 1962, Edgecombe arrived at Ward’s Wimple Mews flat. Keeler, there visiting Mandy Rice-Davies who was living with Ward, refused to let him in. Edgecombe shot at the door with the revolver that had belonged to Keeler.
Keeler was imprisoned for nine months for perjury in a related trial involving 'Lucky' Gordon. Stephen Ward was charged with living on the earnings of prostitution, including earnings from Christine Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies;
In 2001, already the author of several books on the affair, Keeler worked with editor Douglas Thompson to write her autobiography titled The Truth at Last: My Story.
In the 1989 film about the Profumo Affair entitled Scandal, actress Joanne Whalley portrayed Keeler.
Keeler appears alongside fellow scandal-beauty Mandy Smith in the promotion video for Bryan Ferry's 1987 hit single "Kiss and tell".
The portrait
At the height of the Profumo Affair in 1963, Keeler sat for a portrait which became famous. The photoshoot with Lewis Morley was to promote a film, The Keeler Affair, that was never distributed. Keeler had unwisely signed a contract which required her to pose nude for publicity photos. Keeler was reluctant to continue, but the film producers insisted, so Morley persuaded Keeler to sit astride a bentwood chair such that whilst technically she would be nude, the back of the chair would obscure most of her body.
At the time, Morley and Keeler were already famous, but the photo propelled the Arne Jacobsen model 3107 chair to stardom.
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