Image copyright Getty Images 
 
 Christine Keeler found herself at the centre of an affair that rocked the British establishment. 
 
 The revelations about her relationship with the cabinet minister John Profumo hastened the end of the Macmillan government. 
 
 The resulting scandal, involving allegations of espionage and prostitution, and a dramatic court case, saw her pilloried in the tabloid press. 
 
 But Keeler was a somewhat naive victim of an establishment that was determined to protect its own position against what it saw as a tide of permissiveness. 
 
 Christine Keeler was born in Uxbridge, west London, on 22 February 1942. 
 
 Her father deserted the family while she was still a young child and her mother later set up home with Edward Huish, in a pair of converted railway carriages near Windsor. 
 
 She was sexually abused as a teenager both by her mother's lover and his friends, for whom she babysat. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption She suffered an abusive childhood 
 
 Keeler left school with no qualifications and had a succession of jobs, including working in a gown showroom and a spell as a waitress. She also posed for some modelling pictures. 
 
 Platonic friendship 
 
 At the age of 17 she became pregnant. Attempts at a self-induced abortion failed but the child, a boy, died days after the birth. 
 
 "I was just 17, I did not have many illusions left, and the ones that did remain were soon to vanish." 
 
 Keeler found a job in Murray's, a Soho nightclub, where she served drinks and posed semi-naked on the stage. She also befriended another model, Mandy Rice-Davies. 
 
 "When we weren't on stage, we were allowed to sit out with the audience for a hostess fee of £5," she later wrote. 
 
 By her own account she, like a number of the girls, had sexual relationships with the club's clients, although it was officially forbidden by the management. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Her relationship with Stephen Ward was platonic 
 
 It was at Murray's that she met Stephen Ward, an osteopath who had a client list that included a number of rich and important people, including the former Conservative MP Viscount Astor. 
 
 Keeler moved into Ward's flat although the couple maintained a platonic friendship. 
 
 Ward took Keeler to parties where he introduced her to many of his friends including Peter Rachman, the notorious slum landlord, with whom she had a relationship. 
 
 Ward and Keeler were also frequent attendees at weekend parties at the Astors' Cliveden estate in Buckinghamshire. 
 
 Dismissed 
 
 At one of these events, on 8 July 1961, Keeler, splashing in the swimming pool, caught the attention of John Profumo, then Secretary of State for War. 
 
 Profumo, who was married to the actress Valerie Hobson, was seen as one of the government's rising stars. He kept in touch with Keeler and the pair had a brief affair. 
 
 Also at the party was Eugene Ivanov, assistant naval attaché at the Soviet Embassy, who was friendly with Ward. 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption John Profumo, here with his wife Valerie Hobson, was seen as a rising political star 
 
 Keeler later claimed she had been sleeping with Ivanov at the same time as she was having an affair with Profumo, but many commentators have since dismissed her account. 
 
 She had also been having relationships with two other men, Lucky Gordon and Johnny Edgecombe. 
 
 Gordon and Edgecombe quarrelled bitterly over Keeler, resulting in Edgecombe firing shots at a flat where Keeler was hiding. 
 
 The subsequent police investigation led the press to take an interest, and reporters soon learned of Keeler's relationship with Profumo. 
 
 'No impropriety' 
 
 Suspicions that Keeler had obtained secrets from Profumo and passed them to Ivanov, led Labour to decide the whole matter was a security issue. 
 
 With the press unwilling to risk a libel suit by publishing the story, Labour MP George Wigg used parliamentary privilege to accuse Profumo of having an affair with Keeler. 
 
 Profumo was forced to come to the House where he denied having sexual relations with Keeler. 
 
 Image copyright PA Image caption Stephen Ward was not destined to hear the verdict at his trial 
 
 "Miss Keeler and I were on friendly terms," he told fellow MPs. "There was no impropriety whatsoever in my acquaintanceship with Miss Keeler." 
 
 Meanwhile, Keeler had testified at the trial of Lucky Gordon, who she claimed had assaulted her. He was jailed for three years. 
 
 On 5 June, Profumo resigned as Secretary of State for War, having admitted that he had lied to the House of Commons about his relationship with Keeler. 
 
 Perjury 
 
 Stephen Ward was arrested and accused of living on Keeler's immoral earnings. His trial began at the Old Bailey in July 1963. 
 
 Image copyright PA Image caption Mandy Rice-Davies (l) was, with Keeler, a key witness in Ward's trial 
 
 In what the writer Ludovic Kennedy described as a blatant miscarriage of justice, Ward was convicted following a devastating summing up by the trial judge. 
 
 But, by the time the jury announced its verdict, Ward was in a coma, having taken an overdose of sleeping pills. He died in hospital three days later. 
 
 In December 1963 Lucky Gordon's sentence was overturned by the Court of Appeal, and Keeler was accused of lying at his trial. 
 
 She pleaded guilty to charges of perjury, and was sentenced to nine months in prison. 
 
 Scandal 
 
 Labour won the 1964 General Election, having used the Profumo affair to accuse the Conservatives of being unfit to govern. 
 
 On her release from prison, Christine Keeler largely disappeared from the public eye. 
 
 There were two marriages which did not last, but did produce two children. 
 
 Image copyright PA Image caption She had little time for a fusty establishment 
 
 Much of the money she had been paid by newspapers had disappeared by the 1970s. 
 
 She published five books about her life, one of which, entitled Scandal, was the basis for the 1989 film of the same name, which starred Joanne Whalley as Keeler. 
 
 As a young woman, Christine Keeler was desperate to get away from an unhappy home and make something of herself. She had little time for the fusty morals of a traditional establishment class. 
 
 Unfortunately for her, that class was desperate to maintain its influence in a country about to experience the dawn of the huge social changes of the 1960s. 
 
 That establishment was aided and abetted by a tabloid press, desperate to expose scandal, even where it didn't exist, just to maintain circulation. 
 
 "They wanted to hear about the sex of course," she once said bitterly. "But not the rest. No one wanted to hear the rest." 

 Christine Keeler, a London showgirl whose simultaneous relationships with British war secretary John Profumo and a Soviet military attache produced the country's most notorious political scandal of the 1960s, died Dec. 4 at a hospital in Farnborough, England. She was 75. 
 
 Her son Seymour Platt announced the death on his Facebook page, noting that the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. 
 
 The Profumo Affair, as it became known, has echoed through the years as one of the era's most lurid tabloid scandals, with hints of espionage, Cold War politics, class prejudice and sexual hypocrisy. 
 
 The case has stayed in the popular imagination in the form of theatrical plays, including a musical by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, a feature film and dozens of books — three of which were written by Ms. Keeler. 
 
 The Profumo Affair made the strikingly beautiful young woman from the British provinces a London celebrity and a perennial staple of headlines and gossip. A nude photograph of Ms. Keeler straddling a chair in 1963 became one of the decade's most famous images. 
 
 She was often described as the call girl — a term she adamantly rejected — who brought down Britain's ruling Conservative government. Profumo, a rising political star who held the cabinet post of secretary of state for war, saw his career go down in flames. 
 
 
 
 Christine Keeler in 1963. (Stf/AP) 
 
 He and Ms. Keeler met in 1961, when she was taking a dip in a swimming pool at the estate of a British lord. He was 46, married and wearing a dinner jacket; she was 19, free-spirited and wearing a smile. 
 
 They began an affair that lasted several months. At the same time, Ms. Keeler was seeing other men, including Yevgeny Ivanov, widely believed to be a Soviet spy. 
 
 Profumo, who was married to film actress Valerie Hobson, tried to conceal his affair with Ms. Keeler. But in 1962, another of her jealous lovers, Johnny Edgecombe, opened fire on the front door of the house where Ms. Keeler was living. 
 
 When she failed to appear as a witness at Edgecombe's trial, people began to wonder why. The full extent of the scandal came to light in 1963. 
 
 After the press learned that Ms. Keeler was keeping company with a Soviet spy, there was concern that she had been wheedling state secrets from Profumo during pillow talk. She said she had to devise clever ploys to keep her romantic (and geopolitical) rivals from bumping into each other. 
 
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 The disgraced Profumo resigned his cabinet post and his seat in parliament. The scandal also led to the 1963 resignation of Britain's Conservative prime minister, Harold Macmillan. 
 
 "Christine was no spy," her onetime lover, Edgecombe, said years later after he served a seven-year prison sentence. "She was far too scatterbrained. She was a party girl. A gorgeous-looking woman who liked men, liked sex and liked to be the center of attention." 
 
 Ms. Keeler and a friend, Mandy Rice-Davies, who died in 2014, acquired a cheeky kind of notoriety, known for their looks and their airy dismissal of stuffy social standards. 
 
 When Lord Astor, the nobleman in whose swimming pool Ms. Keeler had been cavorting, denied that he was involved with the teenage Rice-Davies, she quipped in court, "Well, he would, wouldn't he?" 
 
 Wherever she turned, Ms. Keeler found herself caught up in legal trouble. She was convicted of perjury in the assault trial of another of her onetime lovers, a man named Lucky Gordon. 
 
 She found her connection to high society through a well-connected osteopath named Stephen Ward. In 1963, Ward went on trial for living off the "immoral earnings" of Ms. Keeler and Rice-Davies — a charge denied by all three. 
 
 "This is a political revenge trial — someone had to be sacrificed, and that was me," Ward said at the time. Near the end of the trial, he took an overdose of sleeping pills. He was found guilty, then died days later without regaining consciousness. 
 
 The story of Profumo, Ward and Ms. Keeler was portrayed in director Michael Caton-Jones's 1989 film "Scandal," in which Ms. Keeler was played by Joanne Whalley. 
 
 "You talk to Christine, and it all happened the day before yesterday," the film's screenwriter, Michael Thomas, told the New York Times. "She says Ward's the only man she ever loved, and you believe her. It's a love story between two people who were the weapons of each other's destruction." 
 
 Christine Margaret Keeler was born Feb. 22, 1942, in Uxbridge, England. Her father left the family when she was young, and she grew up with her mother and stepfather in an abandoned railroad car in rural Berkshire, England. 
 
 She lived in such fear of her stepfather, she said, that she kept a knife under her pillow. She left home for London when she was 15. 
 
 Over the years, she said she had liaisons with the Beatles' Ringo Starr and actors Warren Beatty, Peter Lawford and George Peppard. Ms. Keeler co-wrote three autobiographical books and had two brief marriages, to James Levermore and Anthony Platt. 
 
 Survivors include a son from each marriage and a granddaughter. 
 
 Profumo, once considered a potential candidate for British prime minister, reconciled with his wife and quietly worked on behalf of the poor and downtrodden. He died in 2006. 
 
 In her later years, Ms. Keeler lived in poverty. She adopted the name of C.M. Sloane as she struggled to find work in advertising, in a school cafeteria and as a receptionist. 
 
 "I mean, it's been a misery for me, living with Christine Keeler," she told Britain's Observer newspaper in 2001. "Even a criminal has the right to a new life, but they made sure I did not have that. They just didn't stop calling me a prostitute for ever and ever and ever and ever. How can anyone live with that? I took on the sins of everybody, of a generation, really." 

 Showgirl’s affairs with Russian diplomat and British MP John Profumo caused one of UK’s biggest scandals of 20th century 
 
 Christine Keeler, the former model at the centre of the Profumo affair that shook British politics in the 1960s, has died aged 75, her family and a close friend have said. 
 
 
 
 Keeler, then a teenage model and showgirl, became famous for her role in the 1963 scandal that rocked the establishment when she had an affair with the Tory cabinet minister John Profumo and a Russian diplomat at the same time at the height of the cold war. Profumo was eventually forced to resign after lying to parliament about the affair. 
 
 Keeler’s son, Seymour Platt, 46, told the Guardian she died on Monday at the Princess Royal university hospital in Farnborough: “My mother passed away last night at about 11.30pm,” he said on Tuesday. 
 
 
 
 Quick guide The key players in the Profumo scandal Show Hide Christine Keeler A former model who was introduced to society figures by the osteopath Stephen Ward. In June 1961, when Keeler was 19, Ward introduced Keeler to John Profumo at a party at the Buckinghamshire stately home, Cliveden. Stephen Ward In 1963, Ward was tried for living off “immoral earnings” after claims that he introduced women including Mandy Rice-Davies and Keeler to rich clients. The case ended with Ward’s suicide. Mandy Rice-Davies The British model made a headline-grabbing appearance at Ward’s trial, claiming that her lovers included Viscount “Bill” Astor, the owner of Cliveden. Told that her alleged former lover denied her allegations, she answered: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” Rice-Davies died of cancer aged 70 in 2014. Yevgeny Ivanov The Soviet naval attaché had an affair with Keeler at the same time as Profumo. The romantic triangle led to Profumo, then secretary of state for war, resigning. John Profumo The affair nearly destroyed Harold Macmillan’s government. Profumo spent the rest of his life volunteering at Toynbee Hall, a charity in east London. He died in 2006, aged 91. 
 
 Written by Holly Watt Photograph: PA 
 
 She had been ill for several months, and suffered from the lung disease COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). 
 
 
 
 A major BBC series revisiting the scandal is due to start filming next year. 
 
 
 
 Keeler, who had been living under the name of Sloane for many years, was briefly married twice, both marriages ending in divorce. She had two sons – James from her first marriage, and Seymour from her second – and a granddaughter. 
 
 
 
 Platt, who lives in Ireland, said he, his wife and their daughter had last seen his mother a week ago. “There was a lot of good around Chris’s rather tragic life, because there was a family around her that loved her,” he said. 
 
 “I think what happened to her back in the day was quite damaging.” 
 
 Born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, and raised by her mother and stepfather, Keeler was working as a cabaret dancer in Soho in London when she met Stephen Ward, an osteopath, artist and “man about town”. 
 
 Christine Keeler obituary Read more 
 
 He introduced her to a party scene attended by aristocrats and VIPs, and through him, in 1961, she met both Profumo, then 46 and secretary of state for war, and the Russian military attache Yevgeny Ivanov, having affairs with both men. 
 
 When the relationships came to light in 1963, amid fears of a cold war security leak, the scandal rocked the Harold Macmillan government. 
 
 Profumo told the House of Commons there was no “impropriety” in their relationship after being asked about it by opposition MPs who voiced concerns about national security implications. 
 
 
 
 Eventually, after more newspaper stories emerged, he admitted lying to the house, and resigned from the cabinet and the Commons. 
 
 
 
 His fall from grace was deemed a contributory factor in the fall of the Macmillan government, with Labour winning under Harold Wilson in 1964. 
 
 Keeler met Mandy Rice-Davies when they worked as dancers in Soho and both women were involved with Ward’s social set. Ward would later be convicted of living off immoral earnings, with Keeler and Rice-Davies as the main witnesses, but he took a fatal overdose before the jury returned their guilty verdict in August 1963. 
 
 At the height of the Profumo affair, Keeler gave newspaper interviews and also posed for the now famous photograph of her sitting naked on a chair. 
 
 Lewis Morley took the photo at the request of Peter Cook as publicity for a film. Photograph: Lewis Morley/Sloane 
 
 The affair only came to light after an incident with Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon, a man whom Keeler’s family and friends said abused and stalked her. Shots were fired into the home of Ward, where Keeler was temporarily seeking refuge. When she was questioned during the subsequent police investigation, details of the affair became public. 
 
 
 
 At the end of 1963, Keeler was sentenced to nine months in prison for perjury in a case brought against Gordon, where she accused him of assault. She spent six months in Holloway prison. 
 
 
 
 Platt, a business analyst, said of his mother: “She was stalked [by Gordon] and didn’t really have anywhere to turn. It made her very vulnerable and extremely mistrusting of men. There weren’t a lot of male figures as I grew up because she wanted to protect me from men.” 
 
 
 
 Platt said his mother was from a generation where there was “great shame” and she had felt it when she recalled her past. 
 
 “But she shouldn’t have because, looking back, there was real good that came out of what happened. It did pull the curtain back, and there were changes in society that were needed.” 
 
 
 
 The photo that launched a thousand poses: photographing Christine Keeler Read more 
 
 He said she was a devoted, loving mother. “She was a good, decent person, and she got a very unfair label that was hard for her to live with.” 
 
 But the press had vilified her, he said. “She was just a young girl having fun during the burgeoning of sexual liberation. She picked up labels, which I think were quite unfair.” 
 
 She found her “notoriety” difficult, he said, and changed her name to Sloane in an attempt to gain anonymity. 
 
 “Chris was feisty. And she would never shy away from a fight. She had a terrific sense of fairness. She would stand up against anybody she thought was doing the wrong thing. 
 
 “And that is something I am very proud of. And hopefully, if there is one lesson I can learn from her, it would be that.” 
 
 Desmond Banks, who had known Keeler since her 20s, and was her solicitor, said: “She was an extraordinary woman, much misunderstood, who deserves redemption.” 
 
 
 
 The scandal had “overshadowed” her life, in particular the behaviour she suffered at the hands of Gordon, he said. 
 
 “Had it not been for “Lucky” Gordon, Christine and indeed, Profumo’s affair with her, would never have been known.” 
 
 
 
 He added: “I can’t think of anyone else who has had three musicals written about her, and several plays, and is seldom out of the news, for one reason or another. 
 
 
 
 “She was the last survivor of a story that gripped Great Britain and the world more than 50 years ago.” 
 
 • This article was amended on 5 December 2017 to amend some details about events relating to Aloysius “Lucky” Gordon.
– "She was the last survivor of a story that gripped Great Britain and the world more than 50 years ago." So says the attorney for Christine Keeler to the Guardian upon news of the 75-year-old's Monday night death. She had been living under the last name Sloane in an attempt to put more distance between herself and the Profumo affair that she was so infamously and indelibly attached to. In 1961 Keeler, then a young cabaret dancer working in London, met Tory cabinet minister and rising political star John Profumo—as well as Russian military attache Yevgeny Ivanov. She began affairs with both men, and when the triangle came to light in 1963, it gripped Britain, played upon Cold War fears, and triggered events that led to the undoing of the Harold Macmillan government. The BBC reports Keeler caught Profumo's eye while "splashing" in a swimming pool at a party in Buckinghamshire; she was 19, reports the Washington Post, and he was 46 and married. Their brief affair surfaced in a convoluted way: Two other men fought over Keeler, and one of them fired shots into a home where she was hiding. Police investigated, and Keeler's connection to Profumo ultimately became publicized. The Ivanov angle led to fears of a security issue; when Profumo was questioned by Parliament, he characterized his relationship with Keeler as platonic. Profumo ended up resigning after admitting he lied. An interesting note from the BBC: "Keeler later claimed she had been sleeping with Ivanov at the same time as she was having an affair with Profumo, but many commentators have since dismissed her account."