Before he settled down with wholesome, charitable wife Sophie, a young Prince Edward spent five years with West End star Ruthie Henshall – and she hasn’t been afraid to dish all about their “very passionate affair”.
“I used to keep him up all night,” Ruthie, 59, recently told Hello! magazine.
For her new memoir The Showgirl And The Prince, the English actress went back almost four decades to lay bare the start of her romance with Edward, who was working as a production assistant at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatre Company.
Ruthie was just 20 when she met the prince, and on the verge of fame with her first big break in Cats. What followed was a clandestine love story that saw the young actress sneaking around Balmoral, Sandringham and even having tea with the late Queen at Windsor.
Bedroom secrets
She even alludes to the rumours Edward was gay, writing about their first romantic experience.
“He undressed me and took me to his bed and we made love for the first time. He was romantic and gentle and definitely NOT GAY! And he definitely had experience.”
When her on-off romance with Edward ended in 1993, Ruthie admitted she was close to a breakdown.
“We’d tried desperately to make it work,” she writes. “But it seemed impossible because of who he was and what I wanted to do in my career.”
Despite their ill-fated affair, Ruthie and Edward remained friendly. She attended his wedding to Sophie six years later, and the actress says she and the prince still speak on the phone several times a year.
“He has called me every single year on my birthday without fail, including this year,” she revealed.
One that got away
But while Edward, 62, has taken Ruthie’s recent admissions in good nature and even gave his approval for her to tell her story, some of her candid confessions – including that Edward once told her that “in a perfect world”, he would have “two wives: one for the job, and one for the woman you loved – because you wouldn’t want the woman you love [to go] through the job” – have left his wife, the Duchess of Edinburgh, embarrassed by the unwanted attention.
“Sophie knows Edward has no plans on a throuple anytime soon, nor was that what he meant, but it’s actually turned into a timely reminder of what she did sacrifice to be married to him,” says our palace source, adding the fact that Ruthie – who likened their situation to that of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson – ultimately decided not to sacrifice her career for love,
has made Sophie, 61, wonder “what might’ve been if she’d also chosen a different path”.
According to palace insiders, Sophie feels “embarrassed” by Ruthie’s confessions of their secret phone calls and the fact that they “couldn’t put each other down”.
“Edward thinks Sophie’s remarkable how she handles high-pressure situations like this – she never loses her cool and always has solutions, not just problems.
“However Sophie’s a master at putting on a good show and behind closed doors she’s told friends it’s disturbing to know Ruthie essentially walked away from Edward’s marriage proposal.
“While he might brush it aside, it’s knocked the wind out of Sophie’s sails. She’s rehashing a lot of memories and it irks her to think she may have been a rebound for Edward, and Ruthie will always be the one who got away.”
Of course, the couple have weathered storms much worse than this but Edward’s right to be concerned at how she’s taking this deep down, despite her tough facade.
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