Jane Asher

Actor, author, businesswoman and distinguished supporter of Humanism

“Rationality isn’t dry and practical and boring; it’s infinitely awe-inspiring.”

Jane Asher was born in 1946, and by the time she was fifteen had appeared in 8 films, 9 television and over 100 radio programmes, and 5 plays, and she continues to act on television and in the theatre. She is also a successful writer, having written three best-selling novels: The Longing, The Question andLosing It. In 1990 she opened her Jane Asher Party Cake shop, which has become one the UK’s best known cake decorating companies. As girl friend of Paul McCartney in the 60s, she was the inspiration of Beatles songs such as “Michelle”, “And I love her”, and “We can work it out”. She is married to the illustrator Gerald Scarfe.

In her 1996 letter accepting the title of Distinguished Supporter of Humanism she advocated “concentrating on the positive – I have learnt to restrain myself from being too vociferously ‘anti’ the Great Man in the Sky. It can emerge very stridently, I think.” In an interview in The Observer in October 1996, she said: “I have no God, not that you would call God. People misunderstand that – they think that, just because I agree with Richard Dawkins, I don’t see terror and wonder in the world. Rationality isn’t dry and practical and boring; it’s infinitely awe-inspiring.”  She was one of the BHA supporters who signed a letter supporting a holiday on Charles’ Darwin’s birthday , published in The Times on February 12, 2003, and also sent to the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary.

As well as supporting the BHA, Jane Asher is President of the National Autistic Society, Arthritis Care and the West London Family Service Unit.She is Vice-President of the National Deaf Children’s Society and the Child Accident Prevention Trust. She is also a Patron of Bowel Cancer UK, the Parkinson’s Disease Society and the Leukaemia & Lymphoma Unit at UCH in London .