Jane Asher plays poised, sometimes brittle middle-class women who know exactly what they are doing. Cinema mostly gave her small parts or pure ones; the stage, which she chose over Hollywood in the late 1960s, got the rest of her.
Fi1m perspective
In Alfie (1966) Jane Asher's Annie cleans Michael Caine's flat. She does not shout at him or weep; she scrubs, and keeps scrubbing, until the place is so spotless he cannot bear to be in it. It is a small part and she plays it small, and it tells you most of what she does on screen. Her women are tidy. The tidiness is where the trouble is kept.
She had been at it since the age of five, in Mandy (1952), and by the mid-1960s she was a fixture of British cinema: Francesca in Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964), Annie in Alfie, then the lead in Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End (1970). Then she turned. In her own account she was offered a film in America and a revival of Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court at the same moment, and "I chose the latter, and it was really my breakthrough into serious theatre." The stage has had most of her since, with television taking the rest: Celia Ryder in Granada's Brideshead Revisited (1981), Elizabeth in A Voyage Round My Father (1982), a run of sitcoms and popular series, and the ensemble of Death at a Funeral (2007). She was still working in theatre into the 2020s.
What the films caught, when they bothered, was a particular kind of poise: the middle-class Englishwoman who knows exactly what she is doing and would rather you did not mention it. Critics who write about her keep going back to Deep End, where Skolimowski gave her a young woman entirely aware of her own sexual power, and it is the one film that was built around her rather than around a man who needed a girl in the doorway. Alfie uses the same quality in three minutes. Annie's disapproval never gets a speech, and does not need one.
The Masque of the Red Death shows the other side of the ledger. Corman and Nicolas Roeg paint the castle one colour at a time and Vincent Price gets all the words; Asher is asked to be pure and appalled for ninety minutes and is given nothing else. Sitting through the dungeon scenes, we felt sorrier for the actress than for the character, because you can see a performer with more to offer being told to widen her eyes and wait. The film is one of the best of its kind. Her part in it is not.
To a generation she is better known for cakes than for anything she did in front of a camera, which is not her fault. The record is there. Start with Alfie, watch what she does with a scrubbing brush, and then find Deep End and see what happened when someone finally let her put it down.
Biography
Jane Asher is an English actress. Born on 5 April 1946 in Willesden, London, she began acting as a child and appeared in films including The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and The Masque of the Red Death (1964).
She played Annie opposite Michael Caine in Alfie (1966) and later appeared in Deep End (1970), Death at a Funeral (2007) and I Give It a Year (2013), as well as television series such as Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989) and Agatha Christie's Marple (2004). Asher has also worked extensively in theatre and has written bestselling novels.
In addition to acting, she has developed a career as an author and entrepreneur, running a cake-decorating business and publishing books on baking and lifestyle.
