A European Informational Website
learn more
April Ashley (born George Jamieson on April 25, 1935) is an English model and restaurant hostess. She was famously outed as a transsexual by the British press in 1961.
After an unhappy childhood in Liverpool, as one of six (6) children of a Roman Catholic father and a Protestant mother, she moved to Paris in the 1950s and joined the cast of the cabaret show at the Carousel theater with the famous French entertainer Coccinelle. She had an early sex reassignment procedure in 1960 in Casablanca, Morocco under Dr Georges Burou [1].
After returning to England, Ashley became a successful fashion model, appearing in such publications as Vogue and winning a small role in the film The Road to Hong Kong, which starred Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Her credit, however, was dropped from the film after she was outed as transsexual by the Sunday People in 1961.
She married Hon. Arthur Corbett in 1963, but the marriage did not last. In 1970 Corbett (later 3rd Baron Rowallan) successfully had the marriage annulled on the grounds that Ashley had been born male, which set the precedent for the legal status of transsexuals in the United Kingdom until the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 came into force.
After a heart attack in London Ashley retired for some years to the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye.
April Ashley's Odyssey, a biography by Duncan Fallowell, was published in 1982. In 2006, Ashley released her autobiography The First Lady and made TV appearances on Channel Five News, This Morning and BBC News. In one interview, she said, "This is the real story and contains a lot of things I just couldn't say in 1982", including details of her affairs with Michael Hutchence, Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Turner Prize sculptor Grayson Perry and the future 19th Duke of Infantado, among others. However, the book was pulped after it was discovered that it had heavily plagiarized the 1982 book on Ashley[1]
At one time, Catherine Zeta-Jones was rumoured to being playing April in a film story of her life.