April Ashley, MBE is an English model and restaurant hostess. She was outed as a transgender woman by the Sunday People newspaper in 1961 and is one of the earliest British people known to have had sex reassignment surgery. Her marriage was annulled in a notable court case known as Corbett v Corbett.
She joined the Merchant Navy in 1951 at the age of 16. Following a suicide attempt, she was given a dishonourable discharge and a second attempt resulted in Ashley being sent to the mental institution in Ormskirk aged 17. In her book The First Lady, Ashley tells the story of the rape she endured while still living as a man. A roommate raped her, and she was severely injured.
After returning to Britain, Ashley began using the name April Ashley and 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. After a friend sold her story to the media, in 1961 under the headline Her' secret is out", the Sunday People outed Ashley as a trans woman. She became a centre of attention and some scandal, and her film credit was instantly dropped. In November 1960, Ashley had met Hon. Arthur Corbett, the Eton-educated son and heir of Lord Rowallan. They wed in 1963, but the marriage quickly broke down. 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 the court considered Ashley to be male, even though Corbett knew about her history when they married. This is the case known as Corbett v Corbett.
Later life
After a heart attack in London, Ashley retired for some years to the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. In her book April Ashley's Odyssey she stated that Amanda Lear was male at birth and they had worked together at Le Carousel where Lear had used the name Peki d'Oslo. Ashley was once great friends with Lear, but according to Ashley's book The First Lady, they had a major falling out and haven't spoken in years. In the 1980s, Ashley married Jeffrey West, on the retired cruise ship RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. In 2005, after the passage of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, Ashley was finally legally recognised as female and issued with a new birth certificate. The then Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom John Prescott, who knew Ashley from the 1950s, helped her with the procedure. Ashley talked about her life at St George's Hall, Liverpool as part of the city's Homotopia festival on 15 November 2008, and on 18 February 2009 at the South Bank Centre. She lives in Fulham, South West London.
Biographies
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 alleged affairs with Michael Hutchence, Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Turner Prize sculptor Grayson Perry and Íñigo de Arteaga y Martín, 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 written about Ashley. In 2012, Pacific Films and Limey Yank Productions announced a project to create a film about April Ashley's life.
