The play, which caused something of a stir when it premiered a century ago, is a comedy, Asher says, but a comedy with a lot more going on underneath the surface about the nature of love, the pressure of societal expectations, and the lessons one generation learns from another. It is also Tom Littler’s first production as artistic director of the Orange Tree, a position he inherited from Paul Miller in October last year, having previously run the 70-seat Jermyn Street Theatre for five years.

“He is such a charming young man,” says Asher. “He must be feeling extra pressure, as this is his first show here, but you don’t sense it in the room. Hopefully he is not feeling too nervous. It is a wonderful appointment, and a great step up from a tiny little theatre to a small little theatre.”

The Circle is Asher’s first stage job since 2019, when she starred in Stephen Unwin’s revival of Noël Coward’s A Song at Twilight with Simon Callow at the Theatre Royal, Bath. The pandemic was tough, she says, but seven decades as a working actor teaches you to take the rough with the smooth.

“Oh, my goodness, no,” Asher says, when asked whether she can pick and choose the jobs she does. “No, no. Sometimes I get offered things that I don’t think are right for me, or that I can’t fit in, and I have to turn them down. Otherwise, I have to just muddle through. I certainly don’t plan things out. I just feel very lucky to still be working after 50-odd years.” A pause. “Seventy-odd years, rather.”

Success in the Swinging Sixties

Asher was born in London in 1946. Her father Richard was a brilliant doctor, who first described and named Munchausen syndrome, then fell ill and took his own life in 1969 when Asher was in her early 20s. Her mother Margaret was an accomplished orchestral oboist, who later became a professor at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Both were keen on theatre, Asher says.

“I’m sure it would have been at Frinton Summer Theatre,” Asher answers, when asked what the first theatre show she saw was. “I remember being taken to see a production of Where the Rainbow Ends at Christmas time, too. And I remember seeing a farce with my parents and being sick with laughter. I remember the actor – I think it was John Slater – looking out at me from the stage and enjoying how much I was laughing. We went to the theatre a lot.”

’You learn from different actors and different directors. You try things. You fail. You pick things up’

At five, Asher was spotted in the street by a film producer – not that she remembers it – and her career as a child actor began. After that first role in Frinton, she played Alice again, in Through the Looking-Glass at the Oxford Playhouse in 1959 and Wendy in Peter Pan in the West End in 1961.

Roles in film and television kept coming, too – in the Kenneth More film The Greengage Summer in 1961, the Disney series The Prince and the Pauper in 1962, the Roger Moore series The Saint in 1963, and, most famously, the Vincent Price horror movie The Masque of the Red Death in 1964.

In 1965, Asher joined the Bristol Old Vic Theatre Company, and stayed with it for the following two years, starring as Juliet to Gawn Grainger’s Romeo, and Ophelia to Richard Pasco’s Hamlet, and touring America with both shows thorughout 1967. Asher considers that time to have been her training.

“I had a terrific time,” she says. “I never went to drama school, so I think of those shows as my equivalent of university. You learn from every production you do, as an adult but especially as a child. You learn from different actors and different directors. You try things. You fail. You pick things up.”

Q&A Jane Asher

What was your first non-theatre job?
I briefly emptied boxes in a supermarket for pocket money when I was young. It wasn’t thrilling.

What was your first professional theatre job?
Frinton-on-Sea in 1952. I’m hoping I might get to perform there again at some point, too.

What do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
Everyone is just as unsure of themselves as you are. That applies to life in general.

If you hadn’t been an actor, what would you have been?
I’d have gone into medicine in one form or another.

Do you have any theatrical superstitions or rituals?
I like to think I’m a rational person, but if someone whistles in the dressing room I will go outside, turn around three times and knock on the door. I would get very worried if anyone quoted ‘the Scottish play’ on stage, too.

Continued...

The Beatles... and beyond

There is an elephant – in Beatle-form, perhaps – in the room when discussing this period of Asher’s life: Paul McCartney. In April 1963, a 17-year-old Asher interviewed the Beatles for the BBC at the Royal Albert Hall, then went to a party with the band that evening. Asher and McCartney, then 20, started a relationship and the Beatle moved into the Asher family home on Wimpole Street later that year.

He stayed with the family for the following three years, through the first wave of Beatlemania. Asher’s musician mother Margaret was a significant influence on McCartney, and it was at 57 Wimpole Street that he wrote some of his most famous songs, including I Want to Hold Your Hand, And I Love Her and We Can Work It Out. Yesterday apparently came to him in a dream he had there, too.

McCartney and Asher moved into a house in St John’s Wood in 1966, and announced their engagement on Christmas Day 1967, breaking millions of young women’s hearts in the process. Asher also went with the band on its famous trip to India in early 1968.

Things did not last, though. McCartney became involved with the American writer Francie Schwartz, and Asher announced that they had broken up in July that year during a live BBC television interview. McCartney has always been cautious about discussing his relationship with Asher, but open about his affection for her mother Margaret and his love for life at her family’s Wimpole Street home. Asher, on the other hand, has kept her lips completely sealed ever since. In a 2005 interview with the Daily Telegraph, she revealed that she found the constant questions about McCartney “insulting”.

This is entirely understandable. Asher’s relationship with McCartney lasted five years and ended 55 years ago, yet the ups and downs of it are picked over by music journalists and Beatles aficionados to this day. Her marriage to the illustrator and cartoonist Gerald Scarfe has lasted more than eight times as long, her own career more than 14 times as long. It must be irritating, constantly being asked about something that happened more than half a century ago. Not that she shows it now.

“I know it’s annoying for you, but I am not going to answer that,” she says, when asked not about the relationship specifically, but about how the spotlight it threw on her in her late-teens and early 20s affected her career. “I’ve had this blanket ban on talking about it for so many years now.”

‘Look Back in Anger was a real breakthrough in my consciousness’

Asher is more comfortable discussing the man she has been happily married to since 1981 – she and Scarfe live in West Sussex, from where Asher commutes to rehearsals in Richmond – and their three children. Asher shielded her kids from the spotlight when they were young, wary of exposing them to the pressures she experienced. Her eldest, Katie Scarfe, did go on to become an actor, though.

“We did keep them away from all that,” Asher says. “Having been through it all myself, I know what it can do to a child. I was lucky and got away without too much damage, but a lot of kids did not. It’s crushing to audition for a show or a baked beans commercial or whatever, then be told you are too fat, too thin, too tall, not clever enough or not loud enough at a young age. It is very dangerous.”

“Once they were old enough to decide for themselves, though, it was totally up to them,” Asher adds. “And Katie is brilliant. She is a fantastic recorder of audio books. We have worked together, too, in The Gathered Leaves at the Park Theatre, London, in 2015. That was lovely, although I did have the fear that comes with any performance, coupled with the terror of watching your child perform, too.”

Moving on with Osborne and Olivier

After leaving the Bristol Old Vic – and splitting up with McCartney – in the late 1960s, Asher was at a crossroads. Part of her wanted to pursue films, having recently starred in Alfie alongside Michael Caine, and part of her wanted to continue working in theatre. It was one job that made up her mind: Anthony Page’s 1968 Royal Court staging of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the play’s first big revival after its groundbreaking 1956 debut, which Asher appeared in alongside Victor Henry.

“That was a time in my career that I could have gone into films, which part of me desperately wanted to do,” Asher remembers. “Look Back in Anger was a real breakthrough in my consciousness, though. It is such brilliant writing, such wonderful theatre. I realised I wanted to keep doing serious theatre.”

‘Working with Laurence Olivier was magic, but it was sad, too’

And so she did. Asher starred in the 1970 London’s Royal Court premiere of Christopher Hampton’s comedy The Philanthropist, then went with it to the West End and Broadway, and appeared in several shows at the NT in the late 1970s. She continued to work in TV, too, notably featuring in a 1982 adaptation of John Mortimer’s A Voyage Round My Father, alongside an ageing Laurence Olivier.

“Working with Olivier was magic, but it was sad, too,” Asher remembers. “He was not very well at all at that time in his life. There was a moment when his character was meant to break into a passage from Henry V – a part he had played brilliantly years beforehand – and he could not remember the lines. It was heartbreaking. He still had that old magic, though. His charisma was still there.”

Asher continued acting on stage and screen throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s – Coward’s Blithe Spirit alongside Marcia Warren in the West End, Sheridan’s The School for Scandal in a star-studded staging back at the Bristol Old Vic, and Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden at the NT, plus recurring roles in the television series Wish Me Luck, Crossroads, Holby City and The Old Guys.

It was in 2004 that she took the role in Festen, David Eldridge’s stage adaptation of the 1998 Danish Dogme film of the same name about accusations of child abuse during a wealthy family’s dinner party. Rufus Norris’ production transferred from the Almeida Theatre to the West End, then went on a national tour. Audiences and critics alike were captivated.

‘I still bake. I find it extraordinarily soothing. There is something so wonderful about a piece of food that you can divide up and share equally’

“It was shockingly brilliant,” Asher remembers. “I think it is the only thing I’ve ever been in that people literally queued around the block to come and see. I played the mother. Jonny Lee Miller played the son, who had been abused by his father. He was just sensational. He made this terrible declaration at the dinner table, and then there was this, long, long silence, while we just ate and the audience watched. The silence just held. It could have been 30 seconds or five minutes. Every night I had to judge when to stand up and break it. It was such fun to play with it like that.”

Asher has had several big jobs in the years since Festen – Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest in Kingston, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations in Leeds, Madame Baurel in An American in Paris in the West End – but that remains the part and the production of which she is most proud.

Not looking back in anger

Asher is not only known for her acting. She has long been a committed campaigner, serving as president of the National Autistic Society since 1997 – “That has been a big part of my life for many, many years, and, my goodness, how things have changed for the better,” she says – and president of Parkinson’s UK since 2007. She puts her passion for such causes down to the influence of her father.

Then, of course, there are the cakes. Asher had always baked and decorated cakes and had always been good at it. It was the actor Phyllis Calvert – who Asher first worked with on Mandy, aged five, then subsequently spent time with during a production of Rodney Ackland’s Before the Party in 1980 – who persuaded her to publish something. A dozen bestselling books, a TV series, a successful cake shop – closed in 2015 after 25 years on Chelsea’s Cale Street – and several ranges of cookware later, and Asher is as well known for her baking as for her acting. Perhaps better known, in some circles.

“I still bake,” Asher says. “I find it extraordinarily soothing. The pleasure I get from putting a cake on the table is out of proportion to the pleasure I get from making it. I don’t want to get too pretentious about it, but there is something so wonderful about a piece of food that you can divide up and share equally.”

For now, though, Asher’s focus is firmly on The Circle, and the latest role in a list that stretches back over seven decades, past all the cakes and cookbooks, past jobs at the National Theatre and Bristol Old Vic, past Paul McCartney, all the way to a five-year-old girl in a black-and-white film in 1952.

CV Jane Asher

Born: London, 1946
Landmark productions: 
• Through the Looking Glass, Oxford Playhouse (1959)
• Romeo and Juliet, Bristol Old Vic (1966)
• Look Back in Anger, Royal Court Theatre, London (1968)
• The Philanthropist, Royal Court Theatre (1970)
• Ophelia, National Theatre, London (1977)
• Blithe Spirit, Vaudeville Theatre, London (1986)
• The School for Scandal, Bristol Old Vic (1990)
• Festen, Almeida Theatre, London (2004)
• An American in Paris, Dominion Theatre, London (2017)
Agent: Olivia Homan, United Agents

The Circle runs at Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, from April 29-June 17. More information: orangetreetheatre.co.uk