Ruthie Henshall's memoir The Showgirl and the Prince details her romance with Prince Edward. Photo / Getty Images
Prince Edward’s love letters have inspired a new memoir that promises to reveal “the bittersweet joy of first love”.
The Prince dated Ruthie Henshall, the West End star, on and off for several years before meeting the then-Sophie Rhys-Jones, who became his wife.
Henshall has said her book, The Showgirl and the Prince, will document their romance from its secretive beginnings to visits to Buckingham Palace and tea at Windsor with Queen Elizabeth II.
The prospect is likely to create angst amid courtiers and the wider royal family as it reels from the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. It is not known whether the palace has been given a preview of the book, due to be published in July.
Henshall, a five-time Olivier Award nominee, said she had been inspired to write it after finding boxes of memorabilia as she cleared out her garage five years ago.
“I found old diaries which I began writing in the 1980s and then found all my letters from Prince Edward, and I was struck by how precious this time in my life was,” said the 58-year-old.
“I was on the West End stage – my dream since I was a girl – and shared a love with a man very few people even know. If this was someone else’s story, I would think they had made it up. So here it is – a look behind the curtain of a crazy life in musical theatre and what happens next when a showgirl falls in love with a Prince.”
Henshall was making her West End debut as a chorus girl in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats when she fell for Prince Edward, now 61, in 1988. The Prince, then 23 and working for the impresario, was “kind and thoughtful”, while Henshall was “not like anyone he’s dated before”.
Henshall, who is understood to have remained on good terms with both Prince Edward and his wife, now the Duchess of Edinburgh, has not always been the soul of discretion.
When she appeared on I’m a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! in 2020, she was shocked to discover that her boast she had “shagged in the bedrooms” of Buckingham Palace had been picked up by the microphones and broadcast to the nation.
She has also previously spoken about being invited to one of the royal family’s summer barbecues at Balmoral, where the late Diana, Princess of Wales, urged her to belt out I Dreamed A Dream, a hit song from Les Miserables.
“I wasn’t nervous because Charles had just made me a couple of Martinis, which is why I ended up singing in front of the Queen,” she recalled in 2023. “I was feeling no pain, because I was three sheets to the wind! It will always be one of my greatest honours. Diana was there, Princess Margaret, the Queen Mum, Edward and Charles.”
In the early days, the couple managed to keep their burgeoning relationship under the radar. The Prince would call Henshall while she was rehearsing and invite her to Buckingham Palace to watch musicals and have dinner, she has said.
When their romance first became public, the Evening Standard headlined the story “Prince and the Showgirl”.
However, Henshall has insisted it was no flash in the pan, once saying: “I genuinely fell in love with him.”
She said of the royal family: “I have nothing but nice things to say about them all. The Queen, in particular, was lovely. Here I was, this chorus girl dating her son – it must have been her worst nightmare!”
The couple separated in 1993, when Henshall chose to focus on her career. She went on to marry and have two daughters, and starred in hit musicals including Chicago, Billy Elliot, Oliver!, Miss Saigon and Cats.
Henshall has also appeared as a judge on Dancing on Ice, and appeared in Coronation Street, playing a cruise ship singer, in 2024.
The announcement of the book came as the Prince and Princess of Wales sought to move beyond the ongoing royal family crisis with a hugely successful visit to Llanidloes, where they were greeted by hundreds of cheering fans.
The couple abandoned their schedule to conduct multiple walkabouts, shaking hands and posing for selfies with well-wishers who had waited under umbrellas for hours to greet them.
It was also business as usual for the King, who had a go at handling an air defence missile launcher on a visit to a Baker Barracks, in Hampshire.
Last year, Henshall admitted that as she got older, she felt unnoticed both in her professional and private life, revealing that she had not had a relationship since the breakup of her marriage 16 years earlier.
Publisher Pan Macmillan described The Showgirl and the Prince as “a funny, intimate and touching memoir” and “a real-life Cinderella story – if Cinders is a lycra-clad chorus girl from Bromley who drinks and smokes too much”.
Buckingham Palace has been contacted for comment.
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