People in the News: Before 1990

US TV journalist, held hostage by Hezbollah in Beirut from 1985 to 1991		Terry Anderson
Businessman and Conservative Party politician, of whom Mandy Rice–Davies famously said "Well, he would, wouldn't he?" when told (at the trial of Stephen Ward) that he denied having had an affair with her		Lord (3rd Viscount) Astor
Controversial US 'televangelist': sentenced to 45 years in jail, and fined $500,000 (later reduced to 8 years in jail) for fraud and conspiracy, in 1988; also settled out of court with Jessica Hahn, who accused him and a colleague of drugging and raping her when she worked as a secretary at his church		Jim Bakker
Soviet ballet dancer (born Riga, Latvia 1948): defected in Canada in 1974, appeared in the 1977 film The Turning Point (for which he received an Oscar nomination), and in the final series of the TV comedy–drama series Sex and the City (2003–4), as the final "love interest" of the central character, Carrie Bradshaw		Mikhail Baryshnikov
Dutch–born British spy and double agent: sentenced to 42 years in prison in 1961, escaped from Wormwood Scrubs to the Soviet Union in 1966; died in Moscow in 2020, aged 98		George Blake
Commons 'researcher' linked in 1989 with Andrew Neill, Donald Trelford, Colin Moynihan and Mark Phillips		Pamella Bordes
Italian banker found hanging from Blackfriars Bridge, 1982		Roberto Calvi
Director of Architecture for the Festival of Britain (1951)		Hugh Casson
Judge who said of Jeffrey Archer's wife Mary, when instructing the jury in Archer's 1987 libel case, "Has she elegance? Has she fragrance? Would she have … radiance?" (In other words: why would Archer sleep with a prostitute when he has a wife like this?)		Mr. Justice Caulfield
Claimed in 1980 that her 9–week–old daughter Azaria had been snatched by a dingo; jailed for life, then acquitted on appeal		Lindy Chamberlain
Body stolen from his grave in Switzerland in March 1978 – three months after his death – and found two months later, buried in a field a few miles away, after the culprits had been caught (having attempted to extort a ransom from his widow)		Charlie Chaplin
A special train, hauled by Battle of Britain class steam locomotive number 34051, travelled from Waterloo to Hanborough on 30 January 1965, carrying the body of		Sir Winston Churchill
Prostitute in the Jeffrey Archer libel case, 1987		Monica Coghlan
British frogman who disappeared in suspicious circumstances, 1956, near visiting Russian ships at Portsmouth		Commander Lionel 'Buster' Crabbe
Nazi war criminal captured by Israelis in Argentina, 1960		Adolf Eichmann
Sat on the Queen's bed in 1982		Michael Fagan
WPC shot dead outside the Libyan People's Bureau in 1984		Yvonne Fletcher
Oliver North's secretary during Irangate (1986)		Fawn Hall
Democrat whose presidential campaign ended in 1987 after an affair with 29–year–old model Donna Rice		Gary Hart
US newspaper heiress, kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, 1974; grew to sympathise with her captors, was convicted of bank robbery and sentenced to jail		Patty Hearst
British teacher, adventurer and writer, sentenced to death by Idi Amin in 1975 for describing him as "a black Nero" and "a village tyrant" in his book The White Pumpkin		Denis Hills
Epidemic that killed about 20 million people in 1918/9		Influenza
Soviet Naval Attaché and 'bed partner' of Christine Keeler		Yevgeny (Eugene) Ivanov
American 'Christian Marxist': leader of the Peoples Temple cult, who orchestrated a mass suicide at his remote jungle commune in Guyana, 1978		Jim (James Warren) Jones
Cecil Parkinson's secretary, who had his illegitimate child – leading to his resignation in 1983		Sara Keays
Call girl with whom John Profumo had a brief affair, leading to his political downfall (see Eugene Ivanov); died in 2017, aged 75, of a chronic lung disease		Christine Keeler
Edward Kennedy's passenger, drowned at Chappaquiddick in 1969		Mary Jo Kopechne
Gained a First in maths at Oxford, 1985, aged 13		Ruth Lawrence
Policeman held hostage in the Iranian Embassy, 1980; later awarded the George Medal		Trevor Lock
Obscure civil servant, read official press releases during the Falklands War		Ian MacDonald
Chairman of the National Coal board during the 1982–3 miners' strike		Ian MacGregor
Tragic Danish circus performer, d. 1899; subject of a 1967 Swedish film, famous for its use of the Andante from Mozart's 21st piano concerto		Elvira Madigan
Bulgarian dissident writer and BBC World Service journalist, murdered in London (near Blackfriars Bridge) with a poisoned pellet fired from an umbrella, 1978		Georgi Markov
Sri Lankan activist: claimed sancturary in a church in Hulme, Manchester, from 1986 to 1989		Viraj Mendis
Resigned from the 1971 Booker Prize judging panel over "too much sex" in the entries		Malcolm Muggeridge
Died from a rare blood disease in 1979, aged 8 years, inspiring his mother (Shirley) to set up a register of bone marrow donors, which she named after him		Anthony Nolan
US Army colonel convicted of supplying arms to the Iran Contras (1986)		Oliver North
Soviet ballet dancer who defected to the West in 1961, while in Paris on tour		Rudolf Nureyev
21–year–old student who set fire to himself in Wenceslaus Square, Prague, Jan 1969, in protest at the Soviet occupation		Jan Palach
New Zealand–born teacher, who died in 1979 (aged 33) from a head injury sustained during an anti–racism demonstration in Southall, Middlesex		Blair Peach
US National Security Advisor and Rear Admiral, resigned 1986 over Irangate		John Poindexter
UK civil servant, tried under the Official Secrets Act in 1985 for leaking classified information about the sinking of the Argentine warship General Belgrano, during the Falklands War, to the Labour MP Tam Dalyell – but acquitted by the jury		Clive Ponting
Prominent UK environmentalist: chair of the Ecology Party, 1979–80 and 1982–84, after which he gave up teaching to become Director of Friends of the Earth in Britain – a post he held until 1990		Jonathon Porritt
Pilot of the U2 spy plane shot down over Russia, 1960		Gary Powers
Polish–born landlord (operating in Notting Hill, London), who kept both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice–Davies (in the same mews house in Marylebone, at different times) as mistresses; died in November 1962, aged 43, after suffering two heart attacks, and gained notoriety as a slum landlord the following year when the Profumo affair hit the headlines		Peter Rachman
Agony aunt, chosen by the BBC in 1987 to be the first person to demontrate on UK television how to put on a condom		Claire Rayner
Times editor, wrote a famous editorial demanding fair treatment for Mick Jagger after his conviction for possessing drugs in 1967		William Rees–Mogg
29–year–old model whose affair with Gary Hart led to his withdrawal from the Presidential campaign, 1987		Donna Rice
Model and dancer who became Peter Rachman's mistress after Christine Keeler – famous for her quip in court (at the trial of Stephen Ward) when told that Lord Astor denied having had an affair with her: "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"		Mandy Rice–Davies
Ran topless onto the field at Twickenham during England v. Australia, 1982		Erica Roe
19–year–old German who landed a Cessna biplane in Red Square, Moscow, 1987		Mathias Rust
Russian physicist and Nobel laureate, released from internment 1987		Andrei Sakharov
IRA prisoner, died 1981 after a 66–day hunger strike		Bobby Sands
Chairman of Guinness who resigned in 1987 as a DTI investigation into the Distillers takeover began		Ernest Saunders
1979: former stable hand and male model (real surname Jossiffe) who claimed that Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe tried to have him shot (because they had had a homosexual affair) after his dog, a Great Dane called Rinka, was shot on Exmoor. Thorpe was tried for attempted murder and conspiracy to murder, but acquitted		Norman Scott
Leader of Newcastle City council, 1960–5; imprisoned for his part in the Poulson scandal		T. Dan Smith
Won £600,000 libel damages against Private Eye, in 1986, later reduced to £60,000		Sonia Sutcliffe
Australian–born Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey by–election, after Bob Mellish stood down in protest against the party's shift to the Left – despite having been denounced by Michael Foot for supporting extra–parliamentary action against the Thatcher government (came second to the Liberal Simon Hughes); co–founder of the gay rights action group OutRage! (1990); attempted a citizen's arrest of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe in 1999, and again in 2001		Peter Tatchell
Famously got lost in the Sahara Desert in 1982 – while taking part in the Paris–Dakar Rally – along with his French driver, Anne–Charlotte Verney, and their mechanic		Mark Thatcher
Civil servant, jailed in 1983 for leaking news of the deployment of Cruise missiles in Britain to The Guardian		Sarah Tisdall
Housewife on the sharp end of Fanny Cradock's criticism on BBC TV's The Big Time (1976) – leading to the end of Cradock's television career		Gwen Troake
Former nuclear technician, convicted of treason in 1986 after revealing details of Israel's nuclear weapons programme to the British press (released in 2004)		Mordechai Vanunu
Danish–born British lawyer (of German descent) convicted on two counts of attempting to murder his wife Sunny (in the USA), but found not guilty on appeal in 1985; played in the 1990 biopic Reversal of Fortune (based on a book of the same title by American lawyer Alan Dershowitz) by Jeremy Irons – a role for which he won the Best Actor Oscar		Claus von Bülow bulow
Dallas District Attorney, 1951–87: led the prosecution of Jack Ruby for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, and was the named defendant in a landmark case of 1973 over the right of a woman known as Jane Roe to have an abortion		Henry Wade
Archbishop of Canterbury's special envoy, kidnapped in Beirut 1987 and held until 1991		Terry Waite
Merseyside couple who became parents to the world's fourth known surviving sextuplets, and the first all–female set, in 1983		Walton (Janet and Graham)
London osteopath who introduced John Profumo to Christine Keeler; charged with living off the avails of prostitution, committed suicide on the last day of his trial		Stephen Ward
Stood against Jeremy Thorpe in the North Devon constituency at the 1979 General Election, for the Dog Lovers' Party (Private Eye journalist; polled only 79 votes)		Auberon Waugh
Dress manufacturer who shot the famous 'home movie' footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy		Abraham Zapruder

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People in the News: Before 1990