LONDON - The goddaughter of Britain's Prince Charles has been found dead at home at age 45.

British socialite Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was a former Sunday Times columnist and reality TV star and had received treatment in 2016 for a non-malignant brain tumour.

Officers were called to her flat in Bramham Gardens, South Kensington, in London, at 1.40pm on Wednesday (Feb 8), according to a BBC report. A woman in her 40s was found dead at the scene, London's Metropolitan Police said.

Her death is being treated as unexplained.

Palmer-Tomkinson rose to fame in the 1990s as a hard-partying "it girl", putting her names to several columns chronicling her glamorous lifestyle.

She was a regular on the London party scene and made headlines for her social life, frequently appearing in the pages of society and celebrity magazines.

She was diagnosed with a tumour last January (2016) after returning from a skiing trip, and hit back at critics who blamed her frail health on her well-documented cocaine addiction, the BBC said.

She was a close friend of Prince Charles, and attended the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge in 2011.

The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall led tributes to Palmer-Tomkinson, and said they were "deeply saddened", by her death, the BBC reported.

Former Daily Mirror editor and US TV host Piers Morgan paid tribute in a tweet that read: "RIP Tara Palmer Tomkinson, 45. A fun, feisty woman who battled many demons. Very sad news."

Later in her career, she appeared on several reality TV shows, including the popular British series I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! in 2002.

Her father, Charles Palmer-Tomkinson, was a former Olympic skier who taught Prince Charles.

The family was skiing with the Prince in the Alps in 1988 when they were hit by an avalanche that killed one member of their party, Major Hugh Lindsay, and left Palmer-Tomkinson's mother Patti with serious leg injuries.