Before Sophie, before the Duke of Edinburgh title, before the steady family-man image - there was a love story conducted between a West End stage and the halls of Buckingham Palace. Now it is being told in full. Actress Ruthie Henshall is set to publish her memoir, The Showgirl and the Prince, this July, and the book promises an intimate account of her on-and-off romance with Prince Edward during the late 1980s and early 1990s, in the years before he met and married Sophie Rhys-Jones.
How the Story Came Back to Life
Now 58, Henshall says the memoir was born not from a publisher's pitch but from a cardboard box. Five years ago, while clearing out her garage, she rediscovered the diaries she had kept since the 1980s - and alongside them, a bundle of letters from a young Prince Edward, written when he was in his early twenties.
"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," she explained. Those letters, according to her publisher Pan Macmillan, form the emotional core of the book - a first-person record of a romance that most of Britain only glimpsed through tabloid headlines.
Cats, Backstage Doors, and a Palace Telephone
When they met in 1988, Henshall was living her childhood dream, making her West End debut in Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. Edward, then working in theatrical production circles, moved in overlapping worlds, and the two connected backstage before the relationship quietly deepened.
In the beginning, it was almost entirely private. Henshall has described how Edward would telephone her during rehearsals and invite her to Buckingham Palace for dinner, or to the theater for musicals they watched like any other couple. When the romance eventually surfaced in public, the Evening Standard immortalized it with the headline that became its shorthand ever after: Prince and the Showgirl.
More Than a Flirtation, She Insists
Tabloids of the era treated the relationship as a lighthearted fling, a showbiz footnote in the royal pages. Henshall has spent years pushing back on that framing. "I genuinely fell in love with him," she has said, rejecting the suggestion that it was a brief, careless affair between a prince and a rising star. The memoir, by all accounts, is her opportunity to make that case with dates, letters, and diaries rather than denials.
The book is also billed as a window into her own improbable life. "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," she has said. "If this was someone else's story, I would think they had made it up."
From Backstage Dinners to Tea With the Queen
According to Pan Macmillan, the memoir follows the relationship's full arc - from its discreet beginnings through increasingly formal occasions, including dinner at Buckingham Palace and, remarkably, tea at Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth II. Few love stories run from a Cats dressing room to royal tea in the space of a courtship, and the promise of that trajectory is precisely what has publishers, royal watchers, and theater fans marking their calendars.
The publisher describes the book as funny and intimate - a behind-the-curtain account of a crazy life in musical theater that happens to intersect, for a few years, with the most famous family in the world.
Where the Story Ends - and Where It Led
The romance ended in 1993, with Henshall choosing to focus on her rapidly rising career, a decision she has described as difficult but clear-eyed. Edward met Sophie Rhys-Jones soon after, and the two married in 1999, building what has become one of the quietest and most stable marriages in the royal family.
Henshall, meanwhile, became one of British musical theater's most celebrated leading ladies, with a career spanning Chicago, Les Miserables, Oliver!, and a stint on I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! that introduced her to a new generation. Their paths diverged, but the memoir suggests the memory never fully faded - it just waited in a garage for thirty years.
Why This Memoir Lands Differently
Royal tell-alls have a fraught reputation lately, and the genre is crowded with grievance and recrimination. What makes The Showgirl and the Prince intriguing is its apparent register: nostalgia rather than attack, affection rather than accusation. It documents an era when a prince could date a West End actress with little more than a wry newspaper headline, before phones, social media, and the modern scrutiny machine made such romances impossible.
Whether readers come for the royal angle or the theater nostalgia, the book promises something rare in the current royal-literature market: a love story told with warmth. The curtain rises in July - and for once, the most anticipated royal reveal of the season comes not from a palace feud, but from a shoebox of letters written by a young man in love, kept safe by the showgirl who never expected the world to finally read them.
