The stunningly beautiful April Ashley has always been one very classy dame. In her youth, she was a showgirl in Paris’s famous Carousel Club before becoming a very successful fashion model and was photographed by David Bailey for Vogue magazine, and then had some small movie roles, after which snagged herself the son and heir of a Lord for a husband. April’s real claim to fame however (and more than a little bit of notoriety at the time) was that she was one of the very first Brits to have sexual re-assignment surgery back in 1960.
April was totally unfazed when the tabloid press outed her a year later and still went ahead with her marriage to the Hon Arthur Corbett, himself a cross-dresser, who had always been fully aware of April’s transition. He proved however to be less of a real gentleman when the marriage ended, and he successfully applied for an annulment on the grounds that April was legally a man.
Penniless and unable to get any modeling work in 1970 April opened a chic restaurant a stone’s throw from Harrods in Knightsbridge called April & Desmond’s. In no time at all it was THE place for ‘tout society’ to go and be seen and be greeted by April the host herself : we know only too well, as we paid several visits to AD8 then as it was known .
Sadly that all came to an abrupt end in 1975 and had a massive heart attack and she left London and retired to a quiet life in the Welsh countryside where she lived for 11 years before small legacies from two locals allowed her to move to the warmer, more liberal France, Spain and finally America’s West Coast.
In 2005, after the passage of the Gender Recognition Act 2004, April was finally legally recognized as a female and issued with a new birth certificate. Then in the 2012 Birthday Honors April was awarded an M.B.E by H.M. The Queen for services to transgender equality.
Now 82 years old , April is working on a new memoir which will cover her live from 1980 until now. Still disarmingly charming as evident in the short video below, she radiates all the graciousness that she exhibited back in the 1960’s when faced with all the negative and nasty attention she received by the press just for being brave enough to want to be her true self in those early pioneering days.
There can be no better person or role model than April Ashley to honor on Trans Awareness Month.
