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West End star Ruthie Henshall has revealed new details of her past relationship with Prince Edward in her memoir, The Showgirl and the Prince.
The book, due for publication in July, will offer insights into her five-year romance with the Duke of Edinburgh, which concluded in 1993.
In excerpts published in the Daily Mail, Henshall recalls her initial meeting with Edward at a theatre, her first visit to Buckingham Palace in denim dungarees, and feeling “mortified” after forgetting to curtsey to the late Queen Elizabeth.
Henshall first met Edward at the New London Theatre when she was 20, starring in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats.
Edward, then 23, was a production assistant for the musical’s company, a role he began after leaving the Royal Marines after just four months in January 1987. The Duke is now 62.
In The Showgirl And The Prince, Henshall recalls being “pleasantly surprised by how attractive I found him” when they first met in 1988, adding she quickly “got a buzz from seeing his reaction to my cheeky, slightly irreverent sense of humour” when he would visit the theatre.
The 59-year-old actress explains she and Edward started spending more time together as she began working on a new project with Lloyd Webber, adding the duke would take her to rehearsals and “kiss me goodbye on the cheek”.
Two months into rehearsals for this new job, in May 1988, Edward invited her to Buckingham Palace to have dinner and watch a film, after which the couple shared their first kiss.
In her book, Kent-born Henshall recalls a series of anecdotes on her visits to Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and the Frogmore estate, where the couple spent many Sundays.
She said she felt “a pang of envy and sadness” when she heard the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were moving into Frogmore in 2019, located just over a mile away from Windsor Castle, as it remained in her memory as her and the duke’s “romantic place”.
The memoir, which will be available from July 16, also mentions Edward’s friends, which Henshall says “seemed very down-to-earth”, as well as her first “spontaneous” meeting with Queen Elizabeth II.
She explains “forgetting to curtsey” and instead grabbing the late Queen’s hand and shaking it “wildly”, which left her “mortified for a while afterwards”.
Ruthie Henshall (Michael Stephens/PA)
Henshall, who performed in many West End shows including Les Miserables, also recalls being asked to sing the musical’s “I Dreamed A Dream” during a visit to Balmoral, after which Edward told her the late Queen said: “Now, that’s a pair of lungs!”
The author also gives details on her intimate life with the duke, writing: “I remember he looked at me like I was gorgeous – something I never really felt inside. It felt like such a natural thing to happen because it was coming out of love.”
In her book, Henshall also tells of the sexual abuse she suffered as a child, which she has openly talked about in interviews, and of her experience seeing a psychiatrist.
The star explains she still lives with trichotillomania, also known as trich – the urge to pull out hair from parts of the body, including the scalp, eyebrows and eyelashes.
While Henshall and the duke separated in 1993, they remained friends for many years, and she attended his wedding to Sophie Rhys-Jones, now the Duchess of Edinburgh, at Windsor Castle in 1999.
A five-time Olivier Award nominee, Henshall won the prestigious theatre award in 1995 for Best Actress in a Musical for her role as Amalia Balash in the West End revival of She Loves Me.
She married actor and singer Tim Howar in 2004, with whom she had two children, before the couple divorced in 2010.
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