Prince Philip and the angry 'showgirl The letters between the star and the Queen's husband, written in terms of concerned friendship by two people caught up in a media maelstrom, are now in my possession, following the death of Peter Knight in 2010. My instructions, in accordance with Kirkwood's will, are to show them to no one except the Duke's official biographer, when one is appointed after his death. Jessica Walker, therefore, has not seen them, although I advised her of significant passages. "The inescapable fact is that Kirkwood's first encounter with the Duke of Edinburgh, and six other meetings with him that followed, ruined her life and robbed her of official recognition in the Honours list, so they are crucial to any proper understanding of her character," she says. Kirkwood created the starring roles in the London productions of musicals by Cole Porter, Noël Coward and Leonard Bernstein. On screen she played opposite George Formby, Arthur Askey, Hollywood's Van Johnson, and Laurence Harvey. Nothing infuriated Kirkwood more in later years than the recurring media headline, "The Prince and the Showgirl." To her, "showgirl" meant chorus girl. Kirkwood had started out at 14 as a solo singer in variety halls, and found the term demeaning. Walker's musical surveys a rollercoaster life that includes four husbands, two bitter divorces, some high-profile lovers - such as Danny Kaye, Max Wall and President Kennedy's brother-in-law, Peter Lawford - and a nervous breakdown in New York, when she tried to kill herself, was detained in a mental hospital for eight months, and had a vision of Jesus reaching out to her. At the time of her encounter with the Duke in October 1948, Kirkwood was long estranged from her first husband, the West End theatre executive Jack Lister, 15 years her senior, and was being squired around town by the court photographer Baron Nahum, who was to complain in his memoirs that "several years of my life were wasted in blind devotion to the beautiful and glamorous Pat Kirkwood." It was Baron who, without the prior knowledge of Kirkwood, brought his friend, Prince Philip, to her dressing room at the London Hippodrome, where she was headlining in the revue Starlight Roof, with Winston Churchill's former son-in-law, Vic Oliver, and a 12-year-old Julie Andrews. Later, the spectacle of the blond, Viking-like royal consort dining in public at Les Ambassadeurs in Mayfair with the West End's highest-paid sex symbol, and then dancing with her until dawn in a London nightclub, created headlines around the world. Rumours about the couple, originating in White's club, included a claim that Philip had given Kirkwood a white Rolls-Royce. She never possessed such a vehicle, but her second husband, the Greek-Russian ship owner Spiro de Spero Gabriele, presented his wife with a miniature white Rolls that stood on her mantelpiece for years afterwards. Her third husband, the Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner composer and actor Hubert Gregg, believed that Philip was "flattered by association with a famous and beautiful star," and revealed that HRH had gone so far as to invite Kirkwood to a Sweethearts and Wives reunion at the Royal Naval College. She did not accept. Most royal rumours fade with time. This one didn't. In 1994, when she became the subject of This is Your Life, Kirkwood swatted two doorstepping red-top reporters with her umbrella, and dispatched her fourth and last husband, Peter Knight, to Buckingham Palace for a crisis conference with Philip's advisers. Fearful of the prospect of the Queen's husband being dragged into a libel action, the Palace pressured Knight into dissuading his wife from issuing proceedings. Kirkwood wanted a Palace denial to protect her reputation, and wrote to Philip: ..." if there had been some support from your direction, the matter could have been squashed years ago, instead of (my) having to battle a sea of sharks single-handed." But Philip replied: "Short of starting libel proceedings, there is absolutely nothing to be done. Invasion of privacy, invention and false quotations are the bane of our existence. Kirkwood did not agree, telling one journalist: "A lady is not normally expected to defend her honour. It is the gentleman who should do that. I would have had a happier and easier life if Prince Philip, instead of coming uninvited to my dressing room, had gone home to his pregnant wife on the night in question. The last time I visited Kirkwood, who died in 2007, she was at Kitwood House nursing home in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, where she spent the final three years of her life suffering from Alzheimer's disease. On the door was the gold plaque from her dressing room at the London Palladium, with her name inscribed on it, and inside was a life-size portrait of her at the height of her beauty, taken by Baron. She glanced at this without recognition. When she sang, however, as she sometimes still did, her memory was restored, and she was word and note perfect. Before I left her for the last time, she sang me one of her favourite songs, For All We Know: For all we know We may never meet again, Before you go Make this moment sweet again. We won't say goodnight Until the last minute, I'll hold out my hand And my heart will be in it... Outside in the car, I found myself moved to tears. Jessica Walker ends her recreation of Kirkwood's life with this song. Walker says her play "leaves it open for the audience to decide what really happened between Miss Kirkwood and the Prince, though his own letters strongly suggest that the alleged romance was a myth. The real scandal is not whether she did or did not have an affair with the Queen's husband, but that this great star, who helped to rally the nation's morale with her performances at the height of the Blitz, was allowed to die without so much as a humble MBE to her name. A London staging is envisaged for the New Year, and in 2014, Walker has been invited to take the play to New York as part of a Brits Off Broadway season. The formidable anger of Pat Kirkwood, unwisely disregarded by Buckingham Palace courtiers during her lifetime, is now, posthumously, going global. Pat Kirkwood is Angry" is at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester (0161 833 9833) from October 3-6, and at the Howard Assembly Room, Leeds Grand Theatre (0844 848 2727) on October 10