<!--Per Wikipedia:Manual of style, use she/her to refer to April Ashley throughout her life.-->

April Ashley (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.<!-- Not first for surgery: See Roberta Cowell. --> 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.

Early life

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, who had married two years before. 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.

1950s to 1970s

Ashley joined the Merchant Navy in 1951 at the age of 16. Following a suicide attempt, she was given dishonourable discharge,

Gender transition

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, 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.

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, and when she woke from the surgery Burou greeted her by saying "Bonjour, Mademoiselle." She became a successful fashion model, appearing as lingerie model in British Vogue, for which she was photographed by David Bailey. She had a small role in the 1962 film The Road to Hong Kong, which starred Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.

A friend sold her story to the media for £5<!-- Not first to be outed, see Michael Dillon --> She responded on 6 May 1962 by telling her story in an article called "My Strange Life" for The News of the World.

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. despite Corbett knowing about her history when they married. Ashley later described this ruling as "cruel".

The case is known as Corbett v Corbett The case and impact on legal definitions of 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).

After the court case, Ashley opened a restaurant in Knightsbridge with a friend, called April and Desmond's. but according to Ashley's book The First Lady they had had a major falling out and had not spoken for years.

In the 1980s, Ashley married Jeffrey West on the cruise ship RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, US. 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.

Ashley returned to the United Kingdom in 2005. and on 18 February 2009 at the Southbank Centre in London.

In 2015, Ashley advised Eddy Redmayne on playing a transgender woman Lili Elbe during the filming of The Danish Girl. She featured on the cover of Attitude and was interviewed for the magazine by Paris Lees. She died at home on 27 December 2021, at the age of 86.

Biographies

April Ashley's Odyssey, a biography by Duncan Fallowell, was published in 1982.

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.

In 2012, Pacific Films and Limey Yank Productions announced a project to create a film about Ashley's life.

In July 2022, Channel 4 broadcast the documentary The Extraordinary Life Of April Ashley.

Bonjour, Mademoiselle!: April Ashley and the pursuit of a lovely life, a biography of Ashley by historians Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts, which also explored the social and political context of Ashley's life and times, was published by Scribe in 2024.

Ashley is featured along with Amanda Lear in the 2025 HBO documentary, Enigma.

  • Ashley was awarded a Lifetime Achievement honour at the European Diversity Awards 2014.
  • In December 2016, Ashley was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Liverpool.
  • In 2019, Ashley was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of London.

References

  • April Ashley Photo Gallery Tribute
  • April Ashley Collection (Digital Transgender Archive)
  • "April Ashley, model, actor and transgender activist, dies aged 86" at The Guardian
  • "April Ashley obituary" at The Times