Off-Screen, Actress Jane Asher Has Cooked Up Quite A Business

During the Beatles’ heyday, Jane Asher was famous for being Paul McCartney’s girlfriend. He wrote many of his famous love songs for her, and they were even engaged for a few months. But their relationship came to an end in 1968.

Soon after, Paul married Linda, and the apricot-haired Asher disappeared from view - at least in America. But not in England, where in between acting assignments she has become the British equivalent of Martha Stewart.

In addition to writing a dozen food and decorating books, Asher owns a cake shop in London and godmothers a quarterly food and crafts magazine that carries her name.

“I’m really an actress with a sideline,” insists Asher, who didn’t set out to influence British lifestyles. “But the lines are beginning to blur. If you ask older people who I am, they’ll say they know me from the theater, TV or films. But young people say, ‘Oh, she’s that woman who makes cakes’ or ‘She’s the lady who advertises biscuits.”’

Those “biscuits” (British for cookies) are what brought Asher to Los Angeles for five days earlier this year.

Asher seems delighted at the prospect of working in the States, even if very briefly.

“Occasionally offers pop up,” she says, “but I don’t look at them or I’d be miserable. While my children are still at home, I can’t work abroad or even do all the theater I’d like in London. Once they’re grown up, it’ll have to be character parts.”

Now 49 but still retaining her delicate look, Asher appeared in the recent Masterpiece Theatre miniseries “The Choir” as the headmaster’s wife. Upcoming is a British film about AIDS, “Closing Numbers,” in which she plays “the wife of a man who turns out to be bisexual,” she says.

Acting, which started out as a hobby when Asher was a child, is slowly reverting to a hobby again. Instead, she spends more of her time as England’s lifestyle guru. Recalling how she got started, she says: “As a teenager I made cakes at home for family parties. I got even more involved when I had kids, and I wrote a book about party cakes.”

The book sold well, and suddenly Asher began seeing her cakes all over town. “Everyone was copying my designs,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is silly. I should be doing cakes myself.”’

In 1990 she opened Jane Asher’s Party Cake Shop in Chelsea, near where she lives with her husband, political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe.

“The day we opened is when I date the beginning of the recession,” she says. “Luckily, people will celebrate no matter what, and they like very ornate, overly complicated cakes.”