Keeler, UK woman at centre of Cold War era sex scandal, dies
london — Christine Keeler, the model and dancer whose liaisons with a British minister and a Soviet diplomat at the height of the Cold War shocked Britain and embroiled the government in a notorious political sex scandal, has died aged 75.
Keeler’s relationship with married Minister of War John Profumo, whom she met, aged 19, while swimming naked at the grand Buckinghamshire estate of his colleague William Astor, shocked socially conservative Britain in the early 1960s.
Front-page revelations that she was also having an affair with a Soviet naval attache, Yevgeny Ivanov, titillated the public and shone a light on the social and sexual mores of Britain’s secretive ruling establishment.
Profumo was forced to resign after lying to parliament about their relationship. Keeler’s son, Seymour Platt, told The Guardian she had died on Tuesday night after suffering for months from a form of lung disease. She had led a humble lifestyle after the scandal but never escaped the notoriety it brought her.
“There was a lot of good around Chris’s rather tragic life, because there was a family around her that loved her,” Platt was quoted as saying. “I think what happened to her back in the day was quite damaging.”