Christine Keeler (1942–2017, Orpington, Kent) was an English model who, as one of the central figures in the Profumo affair, contributed to the collapse of the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan.
At age 16, Keeler left home and moved to London to work as a fashion model. Over the next two years she took a number of different jobs, eventually becoming a dancer at a Soho gentlemen’s club that catered to the upper classes. There she met Charles Ward, a physician who was connected to some of the most politically and socially powerful families in England. Keeler moved in with Ward, and he acted as her patron, introducing her to men who moved in his circle, including Eugene Ivanov, a Russian military attaché and intelligence agent with whom Keeler became romantically involved.
In July 1961 Keeler met John Profumo, the secretary of state for war, at one of Ward’s parties, and the two began a short-lived affair. Rumours of the relationship leaked to the press, but Profumo was quick to deny them, going so far as to lie before Parliament in March 1963. Evidence of the affair quickly accumulated, however, and Profumo resigned in June 1963. Largely due to the scandal, the Macmillan government was voted out of office within a year.
At the height of the media flurry surrounding the Profumo affair, Keeler posed for a series of publicity shots with photographer Lewis Morley. The most famous of those images, featuring a nude Keeler astride a wooden chair, became one of the most iconic photographs of the 1960s. Keeler subsequently retreated to private life, emerging in 2001 with the biography The Truth at Last: My Story. The events of the Profumo affair were dramatized in the film Scandal (1989).
On 5 December 2017, Keeler’s son Seymour Platt announced that his mother “passed away last night at about 11.30 p.m.” at the Princess Royal University Hospital in Locksbottom, Greater London. She had been ill for some months, suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and was aged 75.
