Maureen Swanson

Maureen Swanson, Countess of Dudley, who has died aged 78, was a Glasgow-born film actress who appeared in several notable British films in the 1950s. She had a relationship with Stephen Ward – one of the key figures in the Profumo affair – and married into the British aristocracy, rubbing shoulders with royalty.

She was born in Glasgow in 1932 and initially went to school in the city but when the family emigrated to South Africa she went to the Sadler's Wells Ballet School in London. Her original intention was to become a dancer and she appeared in a production called Polonaise at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow in 1947.

In 1951 she got her big break when she took over the role of the daughter Louise in the original London West End production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel in 1951. She reprised the role on a tour that included the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh and the King's Theatre in Glasgow in 1951-1952.

The legendary film director John Huston signed her up to play the role of the aristocratic young woman who rejects Toulouse-Lautrec's marriage proposal in Moulin Rouge (1952), a rejection that prompts Lautrec to leave home and pursue the life of an artist in Paris.

Swanson also had a major role in MGM's Cinemascope feature Knights of the Round Table (1953). She was Lancelot's wife Elaine, who finds herself in competition for his affections with Ava Gardner's Guinevere.

Sensing a major new British star in the making, Rank put her under contract and cast her as one of the women taken prisoner and marched through the countryside by the Japanese in the war film A Town Like Alice (1956).

That same year she also appeared in The Spanish Gardener and the Norman Wisdom comedy Up in the World. The Spanish Gardener continues to attract attention among film historians for its homosexual subtext, from which her presence, as Dirk Bogarde's girlfriend, did much to steer censors away.

With a glamorous figure, she was compared to Vivien Leigh and Rita Hayworth. Swanson attracted attention in what at the time would have been termed "society". She counted several titled gentlemen among her friends and suitors, including Lord Ednam, though he was at the time still married to his first wife.

They married within days of his divorce, though his father, the third Earl of Dudly, controversially opted to play bridge instead of attending the ceremony. She quit her film career at that point and when Lord Ednam became the fourth Earl of Dudley she became a countess.

She returned to the public eye, however, as a result of a series of court cases and controversies over the years. She accompanied Princess Michael to the US in 1982, but the Princess's solicitors threatened legal action when the Earl circulated a piece of doggerel inspired by the trip. He was forced to write a letter of apology.

The Countess won a series of libel cases, firstly against a literary publication that claimed she had refused to pay her expenses on the trip with Princess Michael and later against the publishers of two books about the Profumo affair.

During the original scandal in 1963 it transpired that the Secretary of State for War had shared a mistress, Christine Keeler, with the Soviet naval attache at the height of the Cold War. A key figure in the affair was Stephen Ward, a society osteopath and artist, who introduced Keeler to Profumo. He was subsequently convicted of living off prostitution and committed suicide.

The books had suggested Swanson was one of Ward's "girls". She admitted to having had a personal relationship with him in her teens, but said they had lost touch by the time of the Profumo business.

She is survived by her husband and their seven children.