A showbusiness legend today spoke out to deny rumours of an affair with Prince Philip which have dogged her for more than 50 years.

Actress Pat Kirkwood says her life was turned into a "nightmare" by accusations that she enjoyed a fling with the Prince in 1948, only months after he married Princess Elizabeth, later to become the Queen.

Miss Kirkwood, now 78 and living in Bingley, told the Telegraph & Argus that the persistent rumours of an affair have caused a great deal of anguish and she wanted the record putting straight once and for all.

"The rumours about my affair with Prince Philip are a lot of rubbish and I'm sick and tired of saying it," said Miss Kirkwood, once Britain's highest paid musical star.

"In 1948 the newspapers were full of it and the rumour just seemed to sweep across London. I was very upset at the time and I just kept thinking that they were started by someone with a marvellous imagination.

"It's been going on so long and I just thought I've got to do something. I even wrote to Prince Philip asking him if he could back me up about this but he said it was best to leave it alone.

"It was all perfectly innocent. There were four of us on the night out and I was certainly never alone with HRH."

Miss Kirkwood, who married her fourth husband Peter Knight, a former Bradford & Bingley Building Society president and Bradford solicitor in 1981, will later this month publish her memoirs - The Time of My Life - in a bid to quash the rumours once and for all.

The rumours last surfaced in the Daily Mail in January, 1998 under the headline "Was Philip Unfaithful?". The Mail confirmed the Palace did not make any complaint about the story.

Miss Kirkwood, whose legs were once described by the legendary theatre critic Kenneth Tynan as "the eighth wonder of the world," said that she only met the prince after that night in 1948 at three royal command performances and at a West End pantomime when he was with the Queen.

She reveals that the last time she was presented to Prince Philip at a meeting of the World Wildlife Fund during the 1980s, he failed to recognise her.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman refused to comment, saying the Palace never commented on autobiographies.

The Prince and the showgirl

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