The position of Rebekah Brooks, News International chief executive officer and favourite of Rupert Murdoch, has come under increasing scrutiny after the latest phone-hacking revelations.

Conspicuous for her shock of curly red hair, it has never been easy for Ms Brooks to elude the limelight.

The 43-year-old became the youngest person to edit a national newspaper when she took over in 2000 at the helm of the News of the World – the newspaper where she had begun her journalistic career 11 years earlier.

In 2002 she married Ross Kemp, at the time one of the UK’s best-known actors, courtesy of his starring role in the BBC soap EastEnders.

Three years later, in November 2005, the couple hit the headlines when it emerged Ms Brooks (or Wade as she then still was, having refused to take Kemp’s surname) had been arrested after an alleged assault on her husband.

Meanwhile, she had been promoted by News Corporation boss Mr Murdoch, who owns the News International stable, to editorship of The Sun, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper.

In 2009, Mr Murdoch promoted her again, to become News International’s chief executive officer. As such, she took operational control over the Australian-born media magnate’s UK stable of newspapers, which also includes The Times and Sunday Times.

But for all the high profile that Ms Brooks has enjoyed, she appears never to have courted publicity in the manner of a Kelvin Mackenzie, one of her predecessors at The Sun, or former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan.

Mr Morgan’s tenure at the Mirror became the springboard for an international career as TV interviewer.

Mr Mackenzie is now an established pundit on media matters, regularly beating the drum for Mr Murdoch (of whom he told Channel 4 News earlier this year: “We should salute him. The man is literally a genius at what he does.”)

Called in March 2003 to give evidence to a Commons committee investigating covert investigative methods, Ms Brooks told MPs that journalists were entitled to use bugging if there was a strong public interest in the story.

At one point Ms Brooks, who was present alongside Andy Coulson, then her deputy at The Sun, admitted that: “We have paid the police for information in the past.”

At this point a mortified Mr Coulson interjected: “We have always operated within the code of the law.”

This week’s unravelling crisis at News International, when it emerged the News of the World had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, has thrown up the revelation that payments were made to senior police officers between 2003 and 2007, while Mr Coulson was the paper’s editor.

Until now, Mr Coulson has taken more flak for whatever happened at News International than his erstwhile colleague. He stood down from editor-ship of News of the World in January 2007 after the imprisonment of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire for phone hacking.

Then in January he resigned as Prime Minister David Cameron’s head of communications.