London: Christine Keeler, the "heartstoppingly beautiful" woman at the centre of Britain's most famous sex scandal, died on Monday of lung disease at a hospital in Hampshire at the age of 75.

Her relationship in the early 1960s with Jack Profumo, the aristocratic minister of war, who first told the Commons that he had not slept with Keeler and then admitted he had lied, led to the fall of Harold Macmillan's Conservative government in 1964.

The "sex and sleaze" scandal was whipped up by the disclosure, with its security implications, that Keeler was simultaneously sleeping with Yevgeny Ivanov, a naval attaché and "spy" at the Soviet embassy in London.

Christine Margaret Keeler was born in Uxbridge, Middlesex, on 22 February 1942, left school at 15, and drifted into Soho as a showgirl by the age of 16. By 19, "the stunning, leggy and red-headed" Keeler was moving in high society, having caught the eye of osteopath Stephen Ward, who introduced her to powerful men.

The action moved to Cliveden, Lord Astor's country residence in Berkshire, where guests were expected to swim naked and where Keeler first encountered Profumo, leading to their affair. Among the other girl who were supplied to the men was a pert 18-year-old, Mandy Rice-Davies.

Pakistan's President, Gen. Ayub Khan, was also a guest at Cliveden but whether he ever crossed the line of control is a secret that has gone to the grave with Keeler.

The spirit of the times was caught in iconic images of Keeler, sitting in a chair, taken in 1963 by Australian photographer Lewis Morley - and which recently figured in an art exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum on the sixties.

Keeler's life was destroyed by the men who had abused her. There were two sons from two failed marriages and a life of obscurity lived in poverty.

"She earned her place in British history but at a huge personal price," one of her sons, Seymour Platt, 46, said yesterday.

In a ghost written book, The Truth At Last, published in 2001 and updated in 2012 as Secrets And Lies, Keeler summed up her life: "My life has been cursed by sex I didn't particularly want.... I was just a 19-year-old girl having a good time."

"I loved every minute of it. But if I had known then what was going to happen, I'd have run off and not stopped until I had reached my mum."