April Ashley MBE (29 April 1935 – 27 December 2021), styled as The Honourable Mrs Corbett from 1963 to 1980, was an English model, author, and LGBT rights activist. In the 1950s, upon being discharged from the Merchant Navy, she performed under the stage name Toni April at Le Carrousel de Paris in Paris. Ashley was outed as a transgender woman by The Sunday People newspaper in 1961 and was one of the earliest British people known to have had gender confirmation surgery. Her first marriage, to the future 3rd Baron Rowallan, was annulled in the High Court of Justice case of Corbett v Corbett. Ashley was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2012 Birthday Honours for services to transgender equality.
Born at 126 Smithdown Road (then Sefton General Hospital) in Liverpool, Ashley was one of six surviving children of a Roman Catholic father, Frederick Jamieson, and Protestant mother, Ada Brown,[2] who had married two years before.[3] During her childhood in Liverpool, Ashley suffered from both calcium deficiency, requiring weekly calcium injections at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital, and bed-wetting, resulting in her being given her own box room, at the age of two, when the family moved house.[4][page needed]
Ashley joined the Merchant Navy in 1951 at the age of 16.[5][6] Following a suicide attempt, she was given dishonourable discharge,[4][page needed] and a second attempt resulted in her being sent to Ormskirk District General Hospital psychiatric unit at age 17.[6] She was treated with hormones and electric shock therapy in the unit.[7][8]
In her book The First Lady, Ashley tells the story of the rape she endured before transitioning. A roommate raped her and she was severely injured.[9][page needed]
After leaving the hospital, Ashley moved to London, at one point claiming to have shared a boarding house with then ship's steward John Prescott, later deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom. Having started cross-dressing and holidaying in France,[10] she moved to Paris in the late 1950s, began using the name Toni April, and joined the entertainer Coccinelle in the cast of the drag cabaret at Le Carrousel de Paris.[6][7][11][page needed]
At the age of 25, having saved £3,000, Ashley had a seven-hour-long experimental sex reassignment surgery on 12 May 1960, performed in Casablanca, Morocco, by Georges Burou. She had been told there was a 50/50 chance of surviving the operation,[12] and when she woke from the surgery Burou greeted her by saying "Bonjour, Mademoiselle."[7] All of her hair fell out, and she endured significant pain, but the operation was successful.[6][11][page needed]
After returning to Britain, she began using the name April Ashley and was recognised for National Insurance taxes as a woman.[13] She became a successful fashion model, appearing as lingerie model in British Vogue,[14][15] for which she was photographed by David Bailey.[16] She had a small role in the 1962 film The Road to Hong Kong, which starred Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.[17][18]
A friend sold her story to the media for £5[15] and on 19 November 1961 The Sunday People outed Ashley as a trans woman, under the headline "Her secret is out."[18][19] She responded on 6 May 1962 by telling her story in an article called "My Strange Life" for The News of the World.[19]
Ashley became a centre of attention and scandal after her outing and her film credit was dropped.[17] Her agency also cancelled her upcoming booked work.[7] She told the Liverpool Echo about the impact of her outing on her career:[8]
"My career was destroyed, and apart from jobs where you were paid under the table, I never worked again."
In November 1960, Ashley met Hon. Arthur Corbett (later 3rd Baron Rowallan), the Eton-educated son and heir of Lord Rowallan. They married in 1963 but the marriage soon deteriorated, at which point Ashley claimed to have a romance with Íñigo de Arteaga y Martín, the heir to the Dukedom of the Infantado.[20] Ashley's lawyers wrote to Corbett in 1966 demanding maintenance payments and in 1967 Corbett responded by filing suit to have the marriage annulled. The annulment was granted in 1970 on the grounds that Ashley was male and that "it was not possible to legally change sex,"[21] despite Corbett knowing about her history when they married. Ashley later described this ruling as "cruel".[22]
The case is known as Corbett v Corbett[6][11][page needed][16] and became a landmark legal ruling in the United Kingdom,[13][21] until the Gender Recognition Act 2004 allowed people to legally change gender and the enactment of the Equality Act 2010.[12][23] The case and impact on legal definitions sexual identity, marriage, and transgender rights has been analysed at length by Christopher Hutton in The Tyranny of Ordinary Meaning: Corbett V Corbett and the Invention of Legal Sex (2019).[24]
After the court case, Ashley opened a restaurant in Knightsbridge with a friend, called April and Desmond's.[21]
After a heart attack in London in 1975, Ashley retired for some years to the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye.[21] In her book April Ashley's Odyssey she stated that Amanda Lear was assigned male at birth and that they had worked together at Le Carousel where Lear had used the drag name Peki d'Oslo.[4][page needed] Ashley had once been great friends with Lear,[25][26] but according to Ashley's book The First Lady they had had a major falling out and had not spoken for years.[citation needed]
In the 1980s, Ashley married Jeffrey West on the cruise ship RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, US.[27] They lived in California and subsequently divorced, but maintained friendly relations. In the 1990s, Ashley was employed by the environmental lobby group, Greenpeace and later by an art gallery.[20]
Ashley returned to the United Kingdom in 2005.[7] She talked about her life at St George's Hall, Liverpool as part of the city's Homotopia Festival on 15 November 2008,[28] and on 18 February 2009 at the Southbank Centre in London.[29]
In 2015, Ashley advised Eddy Redmayne on playing a transgender woman Lili Elbe during the filming of The Danish Girl.[21] Also in 2015, Ashley appeared on ITV's talk show Loose Women.[30] She featured on the cover of Attitude and was interviewed for the magazine by Paris Lees.[8]
Ashley latterly lived in Fulham, southwest London.[17] She died at home on 27 December 2021, at the age of 86.[5][31][7] She was buried at Ford Cemetery, Litherland, with her father and grandparents.[32][33]
April Ashley's Odyssey, a biography by Duncan Fallowell, was published in 1982.[4] In 2006, Ashley released her autobiography, The First Lady,[9] 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 alleged affairs with Michael Hutchence, Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Turner Prize sculptor Grayson Perry and others.[9] The book was pulled from the market, however, after it was discovered that it heavily plagiarized the 1982 book written by Fallowell.[34]
The 1983 biography of Peter O'Toole by Michael Freedland rejects the claim of an affair with Ashley. It states that he was acquainted with her in Spain while filming, but his then-wife Siân Phillips was with him at the time and knew the relationship to be platonic.[35][page needed]
In 2012, Pacific Films and Limey Yank Productions announced a project to create a film about Ashley's life.[36]
In July 2022, Channel 4 broadcast the documentary The Extraordinary Life Of April Ashley.[37][38]
Ashley is featured along with Amanda Lear in the 2025 HBO documentary, Enigma.[26]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| People | |
| Other | |
