Jane Asher, the actress who was Paul McCartney's girlfriend for five years during The Beatles' rise to fame, has maintained a decades-long silence about their relationship, declining to discuss it even as new biopics are set to portray their romance.
A Sixties Romance Revisited
In April 1963, 17-year-old actress Jane Asher was sent by the Radio Times to cover a concert at the Royal Albert Hall headlined by The Beatles. Already a regular on the BBC music programme Juke Box Jury, Asher met the four lads from Liverpool, whose popularity was soaring after Please Please Me topped the charts that January. McCartney later recalled, "We all fancied her… So it was, 'Wow, you're a redhead!' I tried pulling her, succeeded, and we were boyfriend and girlfriend for quite a long time."
The pair were together for the next five years, becoming one of the most photographed couples of the Swinging Sixties. Soon, their relationship will be in the public domain again, with Lucy Boynton portraying Jane and Paul Mescal playing McCartney in director Sam Mendes' forthcoming quartet of biopics of the Fab Four.
Witness to Beatles History
Jane was present for some of The Beatles' most seminal moments. She was with Paul when he heard the news of manager Brian Epstein's death in 1967, and she accompanied the group on their spiritual retreat to Rishikesh, India, in February 1968 to study with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She was also with McCartney when, in 1966, he bought a Scottish farm in the Mull of Kintyre as a retreat from intense fame.
Despite her central role, Asher has for decades refused to discuss her time as one of the most envied young women on the planet. Recently, in connection with the Mendes films, the BAFTA-nominated actress again made clear that she has no intention of breaking that rule now, and does not even plan to watch the films. "People would offer me money to talk about it, all sorts of things," she said. "But I won't discuss it. It was so long ago."
McCartney has respected that decision. "I always feel very wary of including Jane in The Beatles' history," he said several years ago. "She's never gone into print about our relationship, whilst everyone on earth has sold their story. So I'd feel weird being the one to kiss and tell. We had a good relationship."
A Muse and a Creative Influence
As his muse, Asher's presence is there in some of Paul's most beautiful work, from the tender And I Love Her to the fragile Here, There and Everywhere, which McCartney has repeatedly described as one of his favourite compositions. It was also through Jane and her family, with whom he lived for three years after her mother offered him a London base in their six-floor Wimpole Street townhouse, that McCartney discovered a world far beyond his working-class Liverpool upbringing.
Born in London in 1946, Asher came from an exceptionally accomplished family. Her father, Dr Richard Asher, was a prominent endocrinologist, haematologist and medical writer, and her mother, Margaret, was a professor of oboe at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Jane began acting at five, appearing in the 1952 film Mandy. McCartney was captivated by the family. "I'd never seen a family quite like this," he recalled. "The only people I'd seen were working-class Liverpool. This was classy London."
Their home became a creative crucible for McCartney, who wrote Yesterday there after the song came to him in a dream. In 1966, Paul bought a three-storey Regency townhouse in St John's Wood, a short walk from Abbey Road Studios, which became a frequent Beatles meeting place.
A Public Breakup and Lasting Silence
During this period, while Paul's fame continued to rocket, Jane's star was also in the ascendant. As a busy actress, she refused to be defined as a Beatle girlfriend, a position McCartney, by his own admission shaped by his traditional working-class northern upbringing, found difficult to accept. Long periods apart were also complicated by McCartney's reported infidelities and his increased interest in drugs. In 1967, Asher returned from a five-month tour of America with the Bristol Old Vic to find that her boyfriend was on LSD.
Despite the strains, Paul proposed at the end of that year, but months later it was over. Appearing on television programme Dee Time, Jane calmly announced that their engagement was off. "I haven't broken it off, but it is broken off, finished," she told host Simon Dee. "I know it sounds corny, but we still see each other and love each other, but it hasn't worked out. Perhaps we'll be childhood sweethearts and meet again and get married when we're about 70."
That never happened. Jane remains happily wed to artist and illustrator Gerald Scarfe, whom she met in 1971, while McCartney went on to enjoy one of music's most enduring marriages with Linda McCartney, who died of breast cancer in 1998. In the intervening years, Paul reflected on the break-up, claiming the relationship had simply never felt right. "I liked her a lot and we got on very well. She was a very intelligent and very interesting person, but I just never clicked." Yet in 2023, McCartney made a tender nod to Jane in his photographic exhibition, Eyes of the Storm, at London's National Portrait Gallery, which included a section devoted to his former fiancée and her family.
And so the teenage actress who captured a mop-top's heart remains as intriguing as she is inscrutable, her lips tightly sealed about the ringside seat she occupied in one of the most extraordinary love stories in musical history.
