Latest news with #SwingingSixties
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Ladies In Black: Trailer, certificate and where to watch
The working women of a swanky Sydney department store open the doors to the Swinging Sixties 2024
Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Roland Curram obituary: Sixties co-star of Julie Christie
There is a scene in Darling (1965), John Schlesinger's triple Oscar-winning paean to the Swinging Sixties starring Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey, in which Roland Curram's character Malcolm goes on a Mediterranean holiday with Julie Christie's Diana, his platonic companion. One morning during breakfast a waiter makes eye contact with Malcolm, a sweetly effeminate fashion photographer, and that night Diana spots them riding away together on a scooter. 'They're going to have sex, even I knew that,' Antony Sher, the actor and director, wrote in The Guardian. The censor in Sher's native South Africa did not. 'He probably thought the waiter was taking Curram to the family home for prayers and teacakes,' Sher added. 'But it was the moment of eye contact over breakfast that really electrified me.' Darling was an electrifying film, one of the defining movies of the decade, and marked the high point of Curram's acting career. By poignant coincidence it was re-released for the 60th anniversary only days before his death. Elsewhere Curram played some of the first gay characters on television including Terry, a resident of a select housing estate in The Crezz, a 12-week Thames TV comedy drama in 1976 starring Peter Bowles. He was also Freddie Martin, a middle-aged and lonely retired nurse, in Eldorado, the shortlived BBC soap opera set on the Costa del Sol. 'Freddie is a conservative man, it would be anathema to him to be a political gay. He is a man of my generation,' Curram explained. It was not until the 1990s, having been married for 21 years with two adult daughters, that the actor himself came out. According to Mark Cunliffe, a contributor to The Geek Show website, Schlesinger (obituary, July 26, 2003) may have cast Curram as Malcolm in Darling because he knew the actor was gay and hoped that playing the character would encourage him to accept the fact. Curram described his adjustment to gay life, and his 'racy, painful and sometimes hilarious adventures struggling with the gods of love and lust', in a self-published memoir, Which Way to Love? (2021). However, his homosexuality came as no surprise to his family because, according to his daughter Lou, 'he had brought us up on a diet of Judy Garland, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbra Streisand'. Roland Kingsford Bernard Curram was born in Brighton, East Sussex, in 1932, the only child of Bernard Curram, an insurance agent who died when his son was seven, and his wife Phyllis (née Ashdown), a milliner and publican. During the war he was evacuated to Scotland and educated at Ayr Academy, later completing his education at Brighton College before entering the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at 16. After several repertory seasons around the country he began appearing on television, including in two 1963 episodes of Dixon of Dock Green. His early film work included Dunkirk (1958), Leslie Norman's wartime dramatisation starring John Mills and Richard Attenborough. He was also seen in Michael Forlong's motor-racing drama The Green Helmet (1961) with Bill Travers and Sid James and gave a sympathetic performance in The Silent Playground (1963), a thriller in which he played a childlike psychiatric outpatient who inadvertently hands out drug-laced sweets to children at a playground. In 1964 Curram married Sheila Gish, an actress whom he had met when they were both appearing in Noël Coward's Present Laughter at Pitlochry. Sheila had a cameo role in Darling and they later worked together on the television play My Secret Husband (1972) for which they auditioned separately and were offered their respective parts before anyone realised they were real-life husband and wife. The marriage was dissolved in 1985 and a decade later Gish won an Olivier award for her role in a revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Company. She died in 2005 and their daughter Lou, who was an actress, died from cancer the following year. He is survived by their younger daughter Kay, a restaurateur. Shortly after his marriage, Curram joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, appearing in 1967 as Henry Dupas, a permissive pastor who is required to conduct a God-free marriage ceremony in Jules Feiffer's Little Murders, a savagely satirical comment on the American way of life. He was also seen in West End stagings of Noises Off, Ross and Design For Living, and in several roles for the RSC and at the National Theatre. His other television credits include the 1976 drama Bouquet of Barbed Wire and a 1978 appearance in the sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. His later films included such lowbrow titles as Ooh … You Are Awful (1972) with Dick Emery, the pornographic memoir Hardcore (1977) and the similarly X-rated Let's Get Laid (1978) with Robin Askwith and Fiona Richmond. The fare was not much better back on the small screen. In Big Jim and the Figaro Club (1981) his accident-prone character, Harold Perkins, was almost blown up on one occasion and nearly drowned on another. 'The script was so fraught with peril that I asked the special effects unit to take special care,' he said. After coming out Curram entered into a civil partnership with Paul Linn, a singer-songwriter. That was dissolved and latterly he was living in west London with Clive Castle, an online tarot reader he met on holiday in Gran Canaria six years ago. Having left acting in the 1990s he reinvented himself as a novelist, publishing five books. Until recently he was still visiting the gym near his home in Chiswick and was frequently seen at first nights in the West End. 'He was theatre to his soul,' said his daughter, Kay. Roland Curram, actor, was born on June 6, 1932. He died from kidney failure and prostate cancer on June 1, 2025, aged 92
Telegraph
29-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Julie Christie film that scandalised Sixties Britain is back – you must see it
When film fans think about the swinging Sixties in cinema, it tends to be with almost Austin Powers-esque nostalgia. One remembers the Beatles gaily dashing about in A Hard Day's Night, Sean Connery's brooding charisma as James Bond and, if you will, the broader delights of the perennially popular Carry On series. Yet many of British film's most talented film-makers, writers and actors also collaborated on films that are both quintessential time capsules of what a certain kind of moneyed bohemian, artistic life was like six decades ago, and also stand up well today. One such example of this kind of picture was John Schlesinger's Darling, which was first released in September 1965 and is now being reissued in cinemas for its 60th anniversary. If you haven't seen it, it is entirely worth getting to your nearest art house cinema and savouring. Sexually charged and transgressive even today, it is the study of a bored, amoral fashion model, Diana Scott (Julie Christie), who divides her self-interested attentions between two older and successful men: the kindly Melvyn Bragg-esque Robert Gold (Dirk Bogarde) and the high-powered and equally ambitious advertising executive Miles Brand (Laurence Harvey). Diana, naturally, betrays both of them, as she has betrayed everyone else who she comes into contact with, but the bed-hopping storyline is not the central appeal of the picture. Instead, Frederic Raphael's Oscar-winning screenplay memorably conjures up an anti-romantic vision of Swinging London where everyone is on the make, and where personal integrity is subsumed to beauty, charm and ambition. Even the film's title is ironic. Schlesinger knew from the outset that the picture was going to be the opposite of the light-hearted optimism of A Hard Day's Night and other quintessential Sixties films. 'I think that our attitude to Darling was a good deal more cynical than merely an optimistic look at Swinging London,' he would admit. The idea for Darling came from a conversation with the journalist Godfrey Winn, who played himself in Billy Liar. Winn asked the director whether he was at all interested in making a film that was based on real life, and when Schlesinger replied that the idea hadn't occurred to him, the journalist told him about what the director called 'an extremely cynical arrangement that was publicised after someone's suicide, in which there was a girl who was being kept by a syndicate of people, people in showbusiness and banking and so forth, and they all had access to her in a flat. One day, she despaired at her predicament, and threw herself out of a window.' Diana does not end the film in similarly fatal fashion, instead being married off to an Italian prince, but nobody would mistake the eventual resolution for a cheery one; it concludes with Diana, betrayed in her turn by a vengeful Robert, leaving Britain for Rome and a new, hollow life there. The ending is an ironic inversion of that of Schlesinger's previous picture, Billy Liar, in which the protagonist is unable to flee to London with his dream girl, but had it not been for the now-forgotten actress Topsy Jane, Darling may never have existed. Jane was originally cast in the brief but pivotal role of Liz, Billy Liar's apparent means of escape, but she dropped out with mental health issues. This necessitated her replacement by the then-unknown Christie, who walked away with the picture in true a-star-is-born fashion. However, it was by no means certain that she would appear in the picture, both for reasons of commercial viability and her own initial distaste for the starring role. The first choice was Shirley MacLaine, who was a far better-known actress – her performance in 1960's The Apartment had been Oscar-nominated – but it was felt that Diana should be played by someone British. As Schlesinger later said: 'We always had Julie Christie in mind for the part, but she was an unknown quantity then, and there was a good deal of resistance… Julie was very perturbed by the part, because she said it wasn't like her. So I said 'You're an actress, for God's sake, you can understand where she's coming from, this character.' Christie – a professional to her fingertips, as she has remained throughout a long and illustrious career – did not need to be told twice. In any case, the screenplay that Christie was presented with had gone through a tortuous creative process. The initial idea had come from Schlesinger, who came up with the storyline in collaboration with the film's producer Joseph Janni. Yet the director was not a proven screenwriter himself, and so he turned to the modish young writer Raphael, who had had some success the previous year with the black comedy Nothing But The Best. The script that they came up with was originally entitled Woman On Her Way, but this was felt to be excessively on the nose, so the simpler, more effective current title was then decided upon. 'The writing of Darling lasted a very long time,' Raphael would recall. 'I started working with John and Joe early in 1962, and the film was eventually shot in 1965, which was a very long gap. I didn't get paid, because I didn't ask for money, which was foolish of me. I got quite tired of it, because John kept saying 'They don't like the script, dear', so we buggered off to Greece to work together.' Raphael would shortly experience his own small-scale betrayal, which would, in turn, affect the misanthropy which seeped into the film's script. 'They then got someone else to do some work on the script, and as I hadn't been paid, I took a rather sour view of this, because I thought we were friends, but there aren't any friends in the business, and I should have known that. Besides, the work was dreadful, and virtually none of it ended up in the film.' Darling eventually began filming in August 1964 in the appropriately swinging cities of Paris, London and Rome, but production was not straightforward. The openly gay Schlesinger and the closeted Bogarde conducted a love affair off-set, and Harvey, who was rumoured to be bisexual himself, was deeply conscious of the fact that his casting in an extended cameo was the major reason that the production had managed to raise its budget of around £400,000. He had become an international star with his role in the 1959 picture Room At The Top, in which he had played an ambitious social climber not a million miles away from a male Diana Scott, but had failed to capitalise on his Oscar-nominated role since, and was desperately in need of a hit. Bogarde, meanwhile, was the fourth choice for the role of Gold, after Paul Newman, Gregory Peck and Cliff Robertson had all turned it down. The character was then rewritten as British, and the versatile and talented actor – who was still tainted by the fall-out from the controversy behind his 1961 Victim – assumed the role. Schlesinger had more fun casting the minor parts – he took a cameo as a theatre director; the Inkling and academic Hugo Dyson appears briefly as a writer; and a real-life Spanish aristocrat, José Luis de Vilallonga, 9 th Marquess of Castellbell, plays the Italian prince who marries Diana – but the film was frequently on the verge of collapse due to a lack of funding. Only Bogarde's reluctant agreement to take a pay cut and David Lean's decision to cast Christie in the sought-after role of Lara in Dr Zhivago, which both created a buzz around her and, crucially, injected money into the production because of her needing to be bought out of her existing contract with the producer Janni, saw it proceed to completion. The jostling egos – Christie aside – and general air of one-upmanship may have fed into the film's uniquely claustrophobic atmosphere. But for Raphael, it made for a miserable experience. 'I'd seen the rushes in London and said that they were dreadful and wrecking the whole film, and I was right,' he said. 'Most of the stuff I'd seen was never in the movie, with Dirk, who was very good in the film, looking like a spurned hairdresser. He did say to me on one occasion 'I find this character very weak in this scene', and I found myself saying to him 'Why the f___ do you think we asked you to do it?'' The typically waspish screenwriter said of the star: 'Julie was extraordinary but not interesting. She couldn't say her lines to save her life and if she could mispronounce anything, she would. But in that movie, she does have an extraordinary quality – all the rawness of her backstory fed into it, and she was that girl.' Christie, perhaps mindful of the knowledge that the film's success rested on her slender shoulders, was very nervous in her first lead role, and often took refuge on the set to fall asleep. It fell to Bogarde to act as a friend and mentor to her, and in his memoir Snakes and Ladders, he wrote of Christie that 'She has more magnetism or, if you like, star quality than any actress I have worked with.' When the picture finally finished production, it was selected for an unusual accolade, and premiered at the Moscow International Film Festival on July 16 1965. If you had wished any film to symbolise the downside of the corrupt and materialistic West, you could hardly have asked for anything more effective. Its button-pushing sexual content was not just near the knuckle for the period, but positively shocking. One talked-about scene showed Diana and Miles attending a cross-dressing bisexual sex show in Paris, which is depicted coyly by today's standards but with enough detail for it to be clear what's going on. Then there's the almost casual revelation that Diana has decided to abort Robert's baby – at a time when abortion was illegal in Britain - rather than be tied down by the responsibility. Little wonder that he rounds on her, sneering 'Your idea of fidelity is not having more than one man in the bed at the same time. You're a whore, baby, that's all. Just a whore' and calling her 'a filthy little bitch.' Schlesinger also included a gay character, in the form of the photographer Malcolm, who is allowed to eye up a good-looking waiter, only to be reprimanded by Diana: 'We are not complicating our holiday with any disgusting sexcapades.' Unsurprisingly, the film had to be cut for both the UK and American release – it still received an X rating in this country – and the unexpurgated version was not released until a DVD release in 2007, which included shots of a man wearing a woman's corset and an extended version of the sex party. It's still strong enough to receive a 15 rating, even now. When it eventually premiered in edited form London in September, it received excellent reviews, all of which concurred that it captured the dark underbelly of the progressive society, and won several awards, including both a Bafta and Oscar for Christie. (Had it not had the BBFC -mandated cuts, it is more likely that it would have been greeted with protests.) One climatic scene in particular, in which Diana, amidst a breakdown, furiously tears off her clothes and jewellery, attracted attention (and was deleted from the initial American release of the film). Christie had not wanted to perform the scene, which required her to appear nude, but Schlesinger and Raphael argued that it was the depth of the character's descent, and thus integral to the picture. She eventually agreed, and the results made her a star. From being an unknown just a couple of years ago, she became perhaps the single most talked-about and iconic woman in Britain, a celebrity on a scale several times greater than even Diana managed. Her own life continued to contain parallels with that of her character – swap out Gold and Brand for the actors Terence Stamp and, notoriously, Warren Beatty – but she displayed rare acuity when it came to the parts that she took later, a legacy of the kudos that this role gave her. Some may suggest that Darling has dated, and that its cynicism and modishness (as well as nods to fashionable directors like Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni) mark it as a film of its time. They may be right, but it also retains a strange, almost transfixing power, largely because of its lead. It was the beginning of a legendary career for her, and she deserved all the acclaim that she received. And Christie herself retained something of the spirit of Darling, after everything. As she told this paper in 2008: 'I honestly don't see anything wrong with hedonism. Life is for having fun with.' Diana may well have agreed with her. The 60th anniversary restoration of Darling is in cinemas from May 30 Beyond Darling: Julie Christie's five greatest roles 1. Billy Liar (1963) As the free-spirited, charismatic Liz, Christie may only be on screen for around ten minutes or so in what was her breakthrough role, but she bursts into cinema as an irrepressible and wholly likeable force of nature. The greatest question for many viewers is why, exactly, Tom Courtenay's fantasist Billy doesn't seize the opportunity to jump onto the train with Liz and embrace a new and happy life, rather than remaining locked up in his fertile imagination. His loss, however, was cinema's gain. 2. Doctor Zhivago (1965) Along with Darling, Christie's great breakthrough role was as the love interest Lara in David Lean's mega-budget adaptation of Boris Pasternak's bestselling novel about the after-effects of the Russian Revolution. Amidst the endless snow, Maurice Jarre's schmaltzy but unforgettable theme tune and scene-stealing performances from character actors (her old inamorata Courtenay among them), Christie manages to anchor the film by playing Lara as simultaneously wholly comprehensible and effervescently mysterious. To be frank, one would launch a revolution just for her. 3. Far From The Madding Crowd (1967) The Kinks sang on Waterloo Sunset about how 'Terry meets Julie, Waterloo station, every Friday night' and the song, written about Christie and her then-lover Terence Stamp, immortalised them as a quintessential Swinging London couple. It was inevitable, then, that they would star opposite each other in Nicolas Roeg 's excellent Thomas Hardy adaptation. Christie was cast as the strong-willed and independent Bathsheba Everdene and Stamp, appropriately enough, appeared as the dashing but venal Sergeant Troy. Roeg managed to make the film both wholly of its time and thoroughly contemporary, and Stamp's scarlet military tunic and virile swagger inspired a thousand hipsters – as well as the entire aesthetic of The Libertines. 4. Don't Look Now (1973) Christie reunited with Roeg for one of cinema's greatest ghost stories, a uniquely haunting study of loss and mystery set in a never more sinister Venice. Although Christie's part was largely a supporting one, with the late, great Donald Sutherland in the central role of her grieving husband convinced that he sees the apparition of her late daughter, they both featured in the film's most (in)famous moment, a lengthy sex scene shot in Roeg's signature time-jumping fashion. It dared to portray married love – and that taking place after terrible loss – in a sensual and exciting fashion, rather than the usual jokey or negligible treatment. It thus led to persistent rumours that the actors got carried away and ended up making love on camera for real. Roeg never denied this with the authority that he should have. 5. Away From Her (2006) Christie became much less prolific as an actress in the early 2000s, and today has apparently retired from cinema. She has only made a handful of on-screen appearances in the past two decades, and the most recent of these came in 2012, in Robert Redford's The Company You Keep. However, she did have one final great role in her, and that was as the Alzheimer's-afflicted Fiona in Sarah Polley's affecting and deeply compassionate study of loss in life. She was deservedly Oscar-nominated for her vanity-free performance, in which she eloquently conveys the indignity and horror of mental decline. If she never makes another film, this stands as a magnificent and resonant testament to her remarkable gifts as an actress.
Hindustan Times
16-05-2025
- Business
- Hindustan Times
Why the cart is always full: The rise of the microtrend in fashion
Fashion trend forecasting is difficult enough when the customer is eager to toe the line. Conformity, for centuries, was the industry's ally. The Swinging Sixties birthed a new generation of forecasters who knew they couldn't rely on lookbooks and swatches from Paris alone, because vast swathes of young people, whether in London or New York, seemed determined not to follow trends but defy them. How does one make any predictions in a world like this? It turns out, rebellion can take predictable shapes too. Pioneering forecasters Leigh Rudd (an entrepreneur) and David Wolfe (a fashion illustrator) scoured not just shops and fashion events in London but streets, clubs and resorts as well, gathering data on early indicators of change. The result: Rudd's consultancy, IM International, famously predicted the 'Hard Times' trend of the 1970s, made up of rebellious looks put together using workman boots, oversized T-shirts, overalls, aprons, and the revolutionary idea of tattered blue jeans. The early tatters were introduced by young wearers, with the trend travelling backwards, to factory floors, where brands reluctantly acceded to it, and even today continue to rip their own new jeans to make the cut. Where else have experts trained their eyes, in efforts to see what young people will try next? *** The internet, of course, was key. Between the ease of managing inventory, reaching out to the customer directly, and ferrying goods more quickly and more seamlessly around the world, brands such as Zara, a pioneer since the 1970s, would force timelines down to as little as 15 days from designer's sketchbook to retail shelf. Shelf lives would shrink. Prices would fall. Buyers would become less concerned with durability, and more taken in by 'how cheap everything is'. As sales volumes grew, so did carbon footprint. Fashion as an industry now accounts for an estimated 347 million to 2.1 billion tonnes of CO2-eq. For perspective, 347 million tonnes is as much as all of India emits in 40 days. *** Another thing fast-fashion spawned? The rise of the microtrend. There have always been fads, particularly in spaces such as accessories and headgear. Think of Britain in the Regency era, or flapper age New York. Thanks to social media, today's microtrends tend to be more widespread and shorter-lived. Think of cottagecore, traceable to the aesthetic of Taylor Swift's 2020 album Folklore; a trend that seemed to last a few weekends. Think of Barbiecore, and the hot-pink everything inspired by Greta Gerwig's 2023 film. There have also been 'mob wife' (French manicures, big coats, heavy gold jewellery; traceable to certain TV shows); and the Brat aesthetic (a neon, Y2K-inspired aesthetic traceable to the 2024 Charli XCX album). *** As consultancies scramble to predict these, a new tool they are deploying is, of course, AI. Companies such as the Paris-based Heuritech, set up in 2013, use a proprietary artificial-intelligence program to analyse images posted on social media. 'We combine statistical approaches and our proprietary deep-learning model to be able to say that… in 24 months, there will be a 13% increase in market demand for leopard print for womenswear in India,' the company said, in a statement to Wknd. A similar process is followed by forecasting labs in India. VisioNxt, the fashion-forecasting initiative of the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), launched by the union textile ministry last year, uses an indigenous deep learning model called DeepVision, paired with observations from 850 trendspotters across the country (most of them NIFT students and alumni-designers) to identify possible cultural shifts. 'Using these datasets, we can tell how a trend of short-sleeved shirts, for instance, is gaining traction among a particular age group, gender and geographic location,' says Kaustav Sengupta, director of insights at VisioNxt and an associate professor at NIFT. Developing the Indian AI algorithm wasn't easy, he adds. To begin with, there was a need for standardisation of terms. What exactly is a kurti? What does one call a long skirt that's not a lehenga? (It's called a lancha, incidentally, and is traditionally worn with a long blouse and dupatta.) The VisioNxt team began, Sengupta says, by creating a standardised taxonomy for Indian fashion: a glossary of over 180 words, defining in precise terms ideas such as the aanchal, jhumka, pathani suit, sharara, zari and jutti. They now release annual trend reports, quarterly reports and trend snippets, customised for clients that include e-commerce platforms, apparel brands, weavers and manufacturers. *** How much of all this is just an educated guess (as so many things are – risk assessment, financial consultancy, pop-up menus)? Consumers need to understand that trend forecasting can be very self-fulfilling, says Talia Hussain, a London-based researcher of sustainable production and consumption through retail and market-making, at the Institute for Creative Futures, Loughborough University. If forecasters say mauve will be a trend, then fashion brands make clothes in mauve, magazines and advertisements feature mauve items, and the colour will appear in stores for people to buy. 'Often, the purpose of the forecast is to align brands, media and customers around the idea of mauve, so that it becomes a trend. They are a way for the industry to manage customers and direct us to buy the things they are making.' Even the fact that trends are increasingly short-lived could be traceable to an industry that wants customers to buy more clothes, and discard them more quickly in order to buy more. 'This is, of course, part of what makes fast fashion so damaging as an industry,' Hussain adds. 'Whether customers respond or rebel is finally up to us.'
The Age
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Sex, spies and a stalker: The campaign to pardon the woman at heart of infamous scandal
More than a political crisis, the affair marked a turning point in British culture—ushering in the permissive society of the Swinging Sixties and forever altering the public's expectations of political transparency and private morality. In 2019, the BBC produced a six-part series to reinterpret the 1960s scandal for the #MeToo generation and the storyline also featured in the Netflix hit The Crown. A 1989 film Scandal starred Sir John Hurt, while Andrew Lloyd Webber produced a short-lived West End musical. Keeler's own conviction stemmed from the case against jazz singer Aloysius 'Lucky' Gordon, her stalker who was jailed in June 1963 for assault. However, his conviction was later overturned when two witnesses came forward to say Keeler had lied under oath about their absence during the alleged attack – claims she admitted in December that year, which led to her being jailed for nine months for perjury. But her son's legal team say Keeler was put under pressure by the witnesses and that she lived in fear of Gordon. Platt first announced his intention to seek a pardon for his mother, which would have to be signed by the King, five years ago and has since worked with lawyers and barristers to build a case. An application was initially sent to the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic but was redirected to the Criminal Cases Review Commission, which told him he should exhaust all legal avenues first. After four years, the commission responded saying that while there was merit to the case, the events happened too long ago. 'It just means that we now go back to the pardon, we've exhausted our legal route,' Platt said. Platt said the conviction had unjustly tainted his mother's legacy. Loading 'She was unbearably honest. I mean, embarrassingly honest,' he said. 'She used to say, a liar has to have a good memory. She was entirely without malice. I never saw her do anything of cruelty to somebody or ever be horrible to people.' The perjury case, he believes, played into a broader narrative that sought to undermine his mother's credibility. 'When I picked up the history books ... I was reading about a woman who had lied, that she lied about being assaulted by a man who was a boyfriend, and she went to prison for that ... [but] when I read the court transcripts, that just wasn't the case. She didn't do that.' Platt, who lives in Ireland, also challenged the perception that Keeler profited from the scandal, pointing out that the first person to sell their story to the press was not his mother but society osteopath Stephen Ward, who had introduced her to Profumo and Ivanov. Loading As public attitudes have shifted, Platt sees a parallel between his mother's treatment and more recent cultural reckonings. At the time Macmillan branded Keeler a 'tart', while his successor as prime minister, Harold Wilson, called her a 'harlot'. 'I think it's like the Monica Lewinsky syndrome, isn't it, where ... a woman has an affair with a man, and we blame the woman, we don't vilify the man,' Platt said. Despite setbacks, Platt remains optimistic. 'My mum didn't do this while she was alive. She didn't have the strength or have the faith in the system. But I'm hopeful,' he said.
