SHE’S the villainess at the heart of The King’s Speech and the subject of a new book and a film by Madonna, previewed at this week’s Venice film festival. She, of course is Wallis Simpson, the Woman Who Stole Our King or 50 per cent of the love affair of the century, depending on your point of view. It’s 25 years since she died but our interest shows no signs of abating. Faith Eckersall asks why.

MAYBE it was her audacity, becoming the lover of the King of England even though she was already married to another man.

Maybe it was her louche, American style. Her ‘you can never be too rich or too thin’ mantra must have seemed so witty in the salons of Europe, but would have grated terribly on all those women of England, who frequently had to pawn their wedding rings to feed their family while she was showered with diamonds.

Or maybe it was her cold, hard, fashionable look; that raven-black hair cut into a bob and her exquisite, couture fashions, so very different from our own, reassuringly dull Queen Mary and later, Queen Elizabeth.

Whatever ‘it’ was, Wallis had it in spades; so much so that she has managed to intrigue and infuriate her way right into the second decade of the 21st century.

Her entrée is all the more remarkable because she made it relatively late in the day. Bessie Wallis Warfield of Baltimore was in her late 30s and already had one divorce behind her when she arrived in London and married Ernest Simpson at Chelsea Register office. By 1934, through assiduous social climbing, she had become the Prince of Wales’ mistress; by summer 1936 their relationship was common knowledge among society. But for most ordinary citizens, the first they knew of this foreign Jezebel was in early December 1936, just days before their king sensationally quit the throne for ‘the woman I love’.

The image most of us have of Wallis is of a hard-faced, immaculately-dressed woman staring out in a succession of photographs. Or, perhaps, those shots of her in her wedding attire, looking slightly less than thrilled as she married Edward at the Chateau de Cande in France.

An elderly journalist, who had travelled to the nuptials with the Duke of Windsor, said: “He looked scared, resigned almost.”

And Wallis? “She was a striking-looking woman, but she had a very ugly nose and huge hands, like a man.”

The biographer James Pope-Hennessy, who met her in 1958, commented in his journal that Wallis was ‘one of the very oddest women I have ever seen’.

Those hands, that square-jawed face and the rumours that she was a hermaphrodite all added to the scandalous brew.

Whether Wallis truly was born of both sexes or, as is now claimed, may have suffered from Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, which could have lead to some of the physical features she was said to possess, is not confirmed in the latest book about her, by writer Anne Sebba.

However, Sebba does claim in That Woman that Wallis actually never wanted to get married and was still in love with Ernest Simpson.

Add to that the rumours that she had learned about sex in a Chinese brothel, undergone an abortion following an affair in Italy (leading to her infertility), enjoyed a liaison with another lover on a boat moored in Poole, and the Windsors’ notorious tour of Nazi Germany.

No wonder she commanded the public’s horrified attention!

Perhaps that is why she interests us. A woman who made the best of her ordinary looks, who wore the most beautiful clothes, who became famous through marriage to a rich and fashionable man, who never possessed any talent apart from social climbing and who died a lonely death as a virtual prisoner in a rented palace.

What else was Wallis but the first proper celebrity?