RUTHIE HENSHALL, THE RUTHLESSLY AMBITIOUS SHOWGIRL WHO REACHED THE ROYAL INNER CIRCLE
After a torrid time for the Royal family, the news this week that one of the King’s brothers’ actress ex-girlfriends was to publish a tell-all memoir about their relationship surely struck fear into the hearts of Buckingham Palace flunkeys.
Courtiers will surely have been relieved, then, to learn that it is not Koo Stark who has written a tome about her time with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Instead, it is the Olivier award-winning Ruthie Henshall recounting her dalliance with the altogether more wholesome Duke of Edinburgh, aka Prince Edward.
Henshall, 58, has written The Showgirl and The Prince after rediscovering love letters from Edward and realising “how precious this time in my life was”. Pan Macmillan, which will publish the book in July, describes it as a “funny, honest and touching real-life Cinderella story – if Cinders is a lycra-clad chorus girl from Bromley who drinks and smokes too much”.
The pair met in 1988, when she was an aspiring star and he worked as a production assistant for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group. “[The relationship] was very discreet,” says Nick Allott, the veteran theatre producer who has known Henshall for the best part of 40 years. “We weren’t really aware of it, and Edward was part of the [theatre] family anyway. It didn’t really impact us in any way.”
Edward, the late Queen’s youngest son, was unusual at the time as a senior royal in having a relatively ordinary, non-military job. “I think what they enjoyed was actually having a bit of a normal life,” Cameron Mackintosh, the celebrated impresario, tells me. “I wasn’t a confidant of Edward’s in any way, but why wouldn’t he [date]? He was working, and that’s how you meet people. You meet people when you’re working, he was working as a theatrical person. Why not go out with a fun, pretty, interesting girl?”
Singing I Dreamed A Dream at dinner with the late Queen
Over the course of dating on-and-off for five years, Henshall became a regular fixture at royal residences and mixed with her paramour’s family. At one famous occasion, the late Queen and Princess Margaret were singing hymns at the dinner table, and Princess Diana asked if Henshall could sing something else instead. As she was playing Fantine in Les Misérables at the time, Henshall decided to sing her showstopping I Dreamed a Dream – having had her nerves steadied by drinking a couple of martinis given to her by the then Prince of Wales. It is, Allott says, “just about the most brave thing I think anyone’s ever done, because the whole of the Royal family was there”.
Henshall, who is said to be on good terms with her ex-boyfriend, discussed their relationship at length when she appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2008. She told Kirsty Young that she “genuinely fell in love with him” and recounted being “smuggled” into the palace in the back of cars. That year, she told The Telegraph that the couple “used to laugh about the rumours that he was gay”. But the question of marriage into the Firm was a non-starter. “I think I was very aware I wouldn’t be able to do what I do for a living if I’d stayed with him,” Henshall admitted.
The actress’s background was a world away from Edward’s. Growing up in Bromley, south-east London – her father was a local newspaper editor in East Anglia, her mother was a drama teacher – she started singing, dancing and acting from a young age. Her much-admired musical theatre career began while she was still a teenager at drama school (Laine Theatre Arts in Epsom, Surrey), when she won a part in a touring production of A Chorus Line in 1986. Her West End debut came the following year, in Lloyd Webber’s Cats.
From the beginning it was clear that she was a versatile performer. “She was talented enough to move from principally being a dancer with a good voice to being able to play Fantine in Les Mis and play Ellen [wife of the romantic lead, Chris] in Miss Saigon,” says Allott. “Two big singing roles which require acting chops.”
And she was willing to give anything a go. “She is a sort of powerhouse, and she has a great personality,” says Mackintosh. “There is nothing she wouldn’t tackle.” To underline the point, he tells me about a time when Henshall helped him out of a sticky situation. Mackintosh had Miss Saigon (in which Henshall was starring) and Les Misérables both running in the West End, but three actresses (one lead and two covers) who could play the tragic Fantine in the latter were all off sick.
Starring in two West End shows on the same night
The impresario thought: “What the f--- am I gonna do?” Then he remembered that Fantine largely only appears in the first part of Les Mis, while Henshall’s part of Ellen is mostly in the second act of Miss Saigon. Mackintosh hatched a plan that saw Henshall play Fantine at the Palace Theatre, be ferried by motorcycle to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, quickly change into her Miss Saigon costume and perform there before zipping back to the Palace in time to reappear as Fantine’s ghost towards the end of Les Mis. “She’s the only lady that I know that has starred in two huge West End hits simultaneously for a week,” he enthuses.
Henshall became well-known for that sort of commitment to her craft, as well as her extraordinary abilities to perform super high kicks. She never made any secret of her ambition to be a leading lady, rather than being confined to the chorus. “From the early years I was always picked out. People did see something that was different. I got the jobs and if I wasn’t being noticed enough, I’d get myself noticed,” she said on Desert Island Discs. “That arrogance of youth that you have: I knew where I wanted to get, I did not want to be in the chorus… I was not going to be Bar Girl #3 for the rest of my life. I had to be at the front.”
Allott remembers a time when he had to “rap her knuckles in the very early stages of her career for being too ambitious”. Henshall was, he adds, “someone who really wanted to get on and was very impatient. I had to say, ‘Whoa, slow down! These shows are going to be around for a long time, and you are clearly going places. But don’t force the issue.’”
She earned the first of her five Olivier nominations for best actress in a musical, on account of her role as Polly Baker in Crazy for You, which opened at the Prince Edward Theatre in 1993 (with much press attention on account of her stepping out with the eponymous prince at the same time). Henshall bagged four more Olivier nominations after her relationship with Edward ended, and won one for her performance as Amalia Balash in the London revival of She Loves Me in 1994. She was, arguably, the biggest theatre actress of the 1990s.
Henshall has a relatable earthiness that can be seen in later stars like Sheridan Smith, and had a penchant for playing no-nonsense women (such as Chicago’s Roxie Hart and Mrs Wilkinson, teacher in Billy Elliot) with aplomb. Allott says that “she’s in the A class, as far as musical theatre performers are concerned,” while Hollywood superstar Mickey Rooney, who played her father in a Canadian production of Crazy for You, once described Henshall as “the most glorious talent I have seen since I worked with Judy Garland”.
The fact that she is not more famous than she is – at a level like Smith, say – may be a result of the relative snobbishness that musical theatre faced when she was at the peak of her powers. And, even now, her CV mostly consists of stage roles, rather than big film or TV parts (though she has in recent years appeared in Coronation Street and was a contestant on I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2020, during which time she memorably told Shane Richie: “You performed in Buckingham Palace, you sang in the gardens; I shagged in the bedrooms”).
Then there was the fact that she did not, for the most part, lead the launch of blockbuster shows. “What she didn’t have was, say, the opportunities for major standout starring roles like Elaine Paige in Evita, and Grizabella in Cats,” says Allott. “She took over in roles, as opposed to creating them.”
Being on stage has never seemed like a job for Henshall, but rather something necessary. She told The Telegraph in 2008 that performing provided a “way to channel the pain” from her difficult childhood. The relationship between Henshall’s parents was “very, very volatile”, and as the youngest of four daughters, she found herself “always trying to lighten the atmosphere”.
Being sexually abused from the age of four
From the age of four, a family friend started sexually abusing her at his home, which had devastating long-term effects on Henshall. “The sexual abuse changed me instantly at four-and-a-half years old when it began,” she said on Desert Island Discs. “And I can’t explain a lot of things about me and my life without taking that into consideration because it instantly made me feel alone, it instantly made me feel bad, it instantly made me feel that obviously there wasn’t a God, because how would that happen? And it has affected every relationship in my life.” She did not tell her parents what had happened until she was 30.
Henshall was also deeply affected by the death by suicide of her sister, Noel, who overdosed on painkillers in 2007. The actress herself told The Telegraph in 2008 that she had been close to suicide at the turn of the millennium, as she dealt with problem drinking and loneliness. “I got to the point where I was about to go to a doctor to get the pills to kill myself. The emotional pain was so terrible that it became a physical pain. I felt I was losing my mind.”
Henshall never married her prince and eventually wed Tim Howar, the Canadian-born actor and singer in Mike + The Mechanics, and the couple had two daughters before splitting in 2010.
For a time afterwards she was largely absent from the spotlight, but returned to prominence during the coronavirus pandemic as she campaigned for relatives of care home residents to be able to visit their loved ones in the face of onerous social-distancing restrictions (her mother, Gloria, was in a home). Henshall also became an outspoken critic of Boris Johnson during the Partygate scandal.
At present, she is back treading the boards as the formidable Fraulein Schneider in the West End production of Cabaret, but given all that is going on with the Royal family, it is the forthcoming publication of Henshall’s book that will put her squarely back in the limelight once again.
“She’s tough. She’s a survivor,” says Allott. “She’s had some tough times, she’s smart. And I really, really like her.”
2026-02-27T19:55:43Z