Leader: Wha’s like us… Ashley Jensen

IT’S easy to be cynical about wealthy actors who do good deeds for charity while at the same time raising their own profiles among the global cinema-going audience which pays their astronomical wages.

For Annan’s Ashley Jensen, star of Ugly Betty and Extras, it would have been simpler, with a new baby daughter, to have kept under the radar in her Los Angeles home from where she is building her career.

Instead, after doing a voiceover for Save The Children’s Born to Shine campaign – in which she lent her voice to a real six-year-old girl, Chhutka, who lives under a flyover and survives by scouring rubbish dumps for scrap metal to sell – she decided to sign up as one of the charity’s ambassadors.

She travelled to the Delhi slums to meet Chhutka and experience the conditions in which she and many others live. She came back humbled and with a lesson for the West’s pampered children. “Despite her struggle and her living conditions, she was still able to smile,” Jensen said.