This issue of The National Insider appeared today in 1965 and features cover star Yvonne Buckingham. The headline refers to her, and the reason men thinks she’s sex mad is because she starred in 1963’s The Christine Keeler Story as the titular Keeler, whose affair with Britain’s Secretary of State for War John Profumo caused a scandal. We find it fascinating that the film appeared in November 1963, mere months after the revelations became public. That’s quick action.
Buckingham had already begun building an acting career, having appeared in at least twenty movies beginning in 1957, but for some reason, after all this steady work, she managed just one more role during the 1960s, and only two more in total. We have no info on whether starring as Keeler negatively affected her career, but certain roles have a way of doing that. Certainly Buckingham thought so, if National Insider can be believed. For example, the blurb beneath her cover photo reads: They ask what I think of Negroes as lovers, says Yvonne Buckingham. This refers to the scandalous revelation that Christine Keeler had a black lover who was peripherally entangled in the Profumo scandal.
In essence, the British press seems to have thought it would be good fun to portray Buckingham as a version of Keeler. The tactic probably helped sell papers and probably even expanded Buckingham’s public profile, but building a very specific association with a persona non grata such as Keeler in the minds of movie producers also very likely diminished Buckingham’s chances to land a wide variety of movie roles (you can get a sense of how toxic even the most tenuous connection to Keeler was by reading what she had to say about it here). Buckingham eventually solved her career problems—in the early 1970s she gave up on the British film industry and moved to Brazil.