Jane Asher turned 80 on Easter Sunday, which reminded me I’d meant to post about her career.
She started acting at the age of 5, and is still working, so her career is even longer than Paul’s or Ringo’s. I’ll also share my impressions of her, as a British gen X person. I’ve been at least vaguely aware of her since childhood, so even if my impressions are wrong, they should give a sense of her reputation in the UK, how she came across.
Barry Miles says her mother, Margaret Asher, “was very much a stage mum, very ambitious for her children and she clearly envisioned a show business career for all of them: Jane was in her first film at the age of five - Mandy, starring Mandy Miller - and her younger sister Clare, who was still at school [when Miles met them], had a part in the daily radio soap, Mrs Dale’s Diary. They seemed to know everyone and have been everywhere, but they were very nice about it.”
Jane’s career has been very well-managed. The transition from child star to adult actor can be tricky. The Asher kids stayed in work, even if not always in acting. Peter went from child actor (movies, stage, radio drama) to being a pop star, went into business with Miles as co-owner of the Indica bookshop and gallery, then became a record producer and executive. Jane’s teenage years were equally deft.
Her early roles are a mix of family drama - roles in Disney’s The Prince and the Pauper, a TV Robin Hood - and movies for adults. She appeared in the movie The Quatermass Xperiment, the X in the title to show that this is scary X-rated sci-fi. In her mid-teens, she appeared on pop panel show Juke Box Jury, and wrote articles. She met the Beatles because she was reporting on them, when she was more famous than they were. (Paul and Mike had already seen Jane on television.)
So she was establishing herself as a celebrity, a personality outside her acting roles. She was a formational crush for a generation of British men (many of whom went on to be Beatles writers - both Craig Brown and Philip Norman clearly fancied her). She was attractive, articulate, middle class - an aspirational fantasy girlfriend, rather than a Brigitte Bardot-style sex symbol.
I think you can see that in her role in Roger Corman’s 1964 movie The Masque of the Red Death, a lush horror film starring Vincent Price as a decadent renaissance prince. Jane is a good girl who rejects his hedonistic philosophy: she argues with him, represents virtue, but still appears in a bathtub scene and in a series of spectacular frocks.
While she’s popular and admired, she tends to be an ensemble actress - the starriness is more in her personality than in her actual roles. Masque of the Red Death is Vincent Price’s movie. She had a supporting role in Alfie, which launched Michael Caine’s international career - but while it’s a cool film to have been in, I don’t think it changed her career trajectory much. She continued into the 1970s with a mix of screen and theatre roles. Despite touring, it’s very much a British rather than an international career.
For actresses, moving into your 40s can be another difficult career transition. Jane diversified, moving into writing and business. She published multiple recipe books, particularly for baking and celebration cakes, before launching her business Jane Asher’s Party Cakes in 1989. She also published novels, children’s books (illustrated by her husband Gerald Scarfe), multiple books on child rearing, entertaining and home tips, and the gobsmacking Jane Asher Fancy Dress book. (Whatever went wrong for Paul and Jane, at least they had unhinged whimsy in common.)
In the 90s, she was a sort of British Martha Stewart - not the same scale or cultural reach, but extremely visible within the UK. She had several television series (entertaining, cooking, decorating your house for Christmas) and even her own Jane Asher magazine. She had a range of baking and homewares, some of which are still available.
Around all this, she went on acting. I’ve seen her twice on stage in the 2000s - in the dark drama Festen, where she played the mother in an unravelling family party, and in the West End stage production of An American in Paris. These were both prestigious, award-winning productions, which I saw for non-Asher reasons, but where her name in the supporting cast will have appealed to (particularly boomer-age) theatregoers.
Looking across her career, she comes across as someone with a ferocious work ethic. Like Paul, she’s a multimillionaire senior citizen who is still working. She has a lot of charm, a lot of energy, readiness to network, powerful ambition.
(Shoutout to @crepesuzette2023 for asking about this, and @bodhbdearg for deleting the version of this that I posted by accident!)
