On her mother’s side, Ward was the great-granddaughter of the Liberal politician Thomas Lister, Lord Ribblesdale, whose sister-in-law Margot Tennant married H. H. Asquith, British Prime Minister at the outbreak of the First World War.

In 1966, at the height of “Swinging London”, Ward’s appearance as Celia Toms, trendy wife of a veterinary surgeon, in Anglia TV’s rural soap opera Weavers Green helped briefly to raise its national profile.

Ward later lived in Mexico with her second husband, Patrick Tritton (born 1934), an old Etonian and graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, whom she married in 1978 and was possibly the model for Dicky Umfraville in novelist Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time.

In July 1961 Ward was convicted at Birmingham Assizes of dangerous driving that caused the death of a roadster after the jury in an earlier hearing had been unable to reach a verdict.

She denied that she had been rushing to get to the theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon for a rehearsal, and was fined £100 and disqualified for driving for four years after the judge, Mr Justice Fenton Atkinson, concluded that no “deliberate recklessness was involved”.