Woman of the week: Jane Asher, actress

Published on Monday 7 January 2008 18:48

UNLIKE some women we could mention who have loved and then lost Paul McCartney, Jane Asher has always maintained a dignified silence on the subject of her past relationship with one of the world's most famous men, proving that it is possible to sustain both a career in the public eye and a private life that is just that.

It is this poise that has afforded Asher a successful multi-stranded career of more than 50 years' standing: this week she takes on a major new TV role, playing Charlotte, the queen mother in a fictional royal family who just happen to live in Buckingham Palace. Some would say that regality is a quality she evokes naturally, better than almost any actress alive.

Born in 1946, the daughter of a physician and a professor of music, Asher became a child actor and first appeared with a small part in the 1952 film Mandy, about a deaf child and her parents. Nine years later she starred in a cinema adaptation of Rumer Godden's loss-of-innocence novel, The Greengage Summer. It was in 1963 that this stunning, miniskirted redhead who epitomised the 1960s youthquake met McCartney, when photographed with The Beatles for a Radio Times interview. Their relationship lasted five years and they got engaged before ultimately splitting up as a result of his infidelity.

During this time Asher also had a fictional role as the girlfriend of a womaniser, when she played alongside Michael Caine in the decade-defining film Alfie (1966), which showed the downside of a newly permissive British society.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Asher was more regularly seen on the small screen, in dramas such as Rumpole of the Bailey and Brideshead Revisited. She also met the cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, whom she would marry in 1981 after ten years as his girlfriend, and who fathered her three children. Even though she grew up in a sexual revolution, Asher admits: "I always assumed that in the marriage I would (do the cooking] and look after the children."

It was home cooking that added another facet to her career when she revealed a talent for amusingly decorated party cakes. She has published books on the subject and owns a central London cake shop. This pre-Nigella domestic goddess is now 61 and a step-grandmother (Scarfe has two grown-up children from his first marriage), but is still an elegant and sexy redhead, who has neither confirmed nor denied seeking out surgical assistance. "I want to look good, but I want to look my age," she has said.

It's fair to say that it's not only her timeless beauty and sartorial elegance that continue to ensure Asher achieves that, but also the fact that her brain is always properly engaged and her emotions in check before she opens her mouth.