ladyjaneasherr

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Little Jane Asher as she participated in an Aer Lingus advertisement in 1953. 🌸

Later on she recalled:

First time abroad: When I was seven I was picked to appear in a magazine ad for Aer Lingus, which involved being flown to Dublin. The flight is the part I will never forget: the excitement of take-off and looking down on clouds for the first time. The memory still gives me a thrill all these years later.

Daily Mail article published in May 14th, 2018.

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Beautiful Jane Asher portrayed for a perfume advertisement, late 1963. Old eBay auction listings! ❤️

My colourisations!

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Lovely Jane Asher portrayed at home, august 7th, 1963. From Tracks UK. 🤍

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As there has been an additional new release (last picture) of lovely Jane Asher swimming while filming the buttercup chain, I decided to unify them in one post, 1969. The film was premiered on september 24th, 1970. From ebay auction listing! 🩵

7th picture is from shutterstock website!

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Jane Asher as Francesca in The masque of the red death, released on June 24th, 1964. 🌻

Part 1

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A new and beautiful release of Jane Asher during the film of Buttercup chain, 1969. The film was premiered on september 24th, 1970. From ebay auction listing! 🩵

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Stunning and lovely Jane Asher, disembarking in Dallas, April 5th 1967 as part of her tour for America where she was appearing with the Bristol Old Vic. Youtube video shared by William Jones collection! 🌻❤️

Part 4

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Lovely Jane Asher as Marielle in Journey to the unknown: somewhere in a crowd, released on november 14th, 1968. 🌹

Part 1

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Stunning and lovely Jane Asher, disembarking in Dallas, April 5th 1967 as part of her tour for America where she was appearing with the Bristol Old Vic. My screen captures from the Youtube video shared by William Jones collection! 🌻✨

Part 3

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High quality version photo of Jane Asher and Paul McCartney from when she was appearing in The Happiest days of your life. According to the site rrauction, where the picture was auctioned in 2021 it says: From the play The Happiest Days of Your Life, which ran from December 1965 - January 1966. Accompanied by a candid photo of McCartney and Asher at the time of signing, which shows the couple backstage at the Bristol Old Vic when McCartney was visiting Asher during a performance of the referenced play; the consignor notes that the signatures and photo belonged to the daughter of the pub owner who obtained the signatures.🌻

My colourisation and enhancement!

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Negatives pictures of Jane Asher as Loretta and Malcom Patton (last picture) as Simon in the play of Summer, July 9th 1968. From eBay auction listing! 🌸🤍

First picture is a new release!

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Lovely Jane Asher reads to the boys Santa Claus and The Tiny Silver Bell. Rainbow (1972-1992). Bells episode, 9 december 1983 from IMDb. 🌻

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Beautiful Jane Asher portrayed in August, 1968. From bridgeman pictures website. My colourisation! ✨

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February 1965– Lovely Jane Asher as Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss. ❤️

The tragic tale of Maggie Tulliver, the miller's daughter, who defies her embittered brother in standing by the man she loves - shocking the stifling society in which she lives - in an attempt to pursue her blighted dreams.

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May 11 1968. Stunning Jane Asher as a braids maid for the wedding of Joan and Stuart. Joan was Jane’s friend and an actress as well. From Daily Mail.

📸: Philip Ide

Daily Mail article posted of October 1st, 2011.

I don’t feel guilty - I like to think that I carried her to the other side: Yorkie Bar actor says he was saved by Jane Asher over wife's 'mercy killing'

Stuart Mungall sat in the almost empty auditorium of the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh and waited for the play to begin. It was late 1967, he had just joined a small theatre company in Scotland and had been asked if he’d like to watch rehearsals for A Christmas Carol.

‘A young woman came on stage,’ he recalls. ‘From the first second, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had such a magic quality and aura.

I was totally hooked. It was love at first sight.’

The young woman was Joan Morrow, then 27. And to 28-year-old Stuart’s delight, she was cast alongside him in the company’s next production, Toad Of Toad Hall. ‘I was Weasel and she played Lucy Rabbit,’ he recalls with a laugh.

After a whirlwind courtship, the couple were married on May 11, 1968, with Joan’s close friend and successful young actress Jane Asher, then also famous as Paul McCartney’s girlfriend, as bridesmaid.

Last week – 42 years later – a letter pleading for clemency from Asher to an Old Bailey judge was instrumental in preventing Stuart, now 72, spending the rest of his life in prison after he admitted the manslaughter of his wife.

The court heard that Stuart, who starred in a series of cult adverts for Yorkie chocolate bars, smothered his beloved, terminally ill wife with a pillow after watching her deteriorate both mentally and physically for six years.

The recorder of London, Judge Peter Beaumont, recognised his devotion after reading Asher’s letter, and handed down a 12-month sentence suspended for two years.

When we meet at the one-bedroom rented flat in Tooting, South London, that was their marital home, Stuart has just returned from what will be a weekly trip to his probation officer as part of his bail conditions. He also has to see a psychiatrist regularly.

‘The psychiatrist is a good chap,’ he says, lighting the first of several cigarettes. ‘But at the moment we are still tiptoeing round that fateful day.’ His weathered face crumples, his eyes fill with tears and for a while he is unable to speak.

Stuart is reluctant to be seen as a champion of euthanasia, assisted suicide or, indeed, anything else. But it is clear that his case and the suspended sentence passed down at the Old Bailey are a significant development in one of the major ethical controversies of our time.

‘People have asked me if I thought about the consequences of my actions,’ he says when he recovers his composure. ‘Of course I didn’t. I don’t have a philosophy based on what happened. I don’t belong to any pro-euthanasia groups. Nor would I presume to say what I did is a good thing. What I do know is that I didn’t want her to have an undignified death.’

Joan, who was 69 when she died, had Pick’s disease – a rare form of dementia similar to Alzheimer’s – and polymyalgia rheumatica, a debilitating condition that causes pain, stiffness and tenderness in the muscles supporting the neck, shoulders, hips and thighs.

‘She was confused, in terrible pain and could hardly move and was asking me to kill her almost every day.

‘Not in those exact words, but she’d shout, “Shoot me. Get me out of this.” My response, especially when her mind got bad, was to divert her attention. I’d say, “There is a great programme I want to watch on the television today. Let’s do it tomorrow.” But in a couple as close as we were, you don’t have to ask for what you want. Joan and I knew instinctively what the other was thinking.

‘And that morning I could tell by the way she looked at me that she had absolutely had enough.

‘When it happened, she didn’t struggle and the autopsy report, to my great relief, stated there was no sign of trauma in her body.’

He pauses. ‘It is a consolation. We had agreed when we were young that we wanted to go together and I certainly felt there was no point ¬living without her.

‘So after she had died, I went into the kitchen and took handfuls of her very strong painkillers which I swallowed with a bottle of brandy.

‘After a few minutes I suddenly remembered our cat and knew Joan wouldn’t have wanted it to be abandoned, so I rang a neighbour, a psychiatrist, and explained what I had done. He came round and called an ambulance and the police.

‘I was taken to Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where my stomach was pumped, and then transferred to a mental hospital in Sutton and then to Belmarsh high-security prison where I stayed for four months.’

Stuart and I are talking in the kitchen of his flat. Over one door is a wooden block with painted words that read: ‘I love you.’ Along one wall is a Welsh dresser with several sunshine-yellow goblets – their wedding present from Asher.

He is obviously very vulnerable, one minute talking with dramatic gestures and an impeccable accent as if on stage, the next doubling over with grief and unable to speak as tears course down his face.

On the face of it, Stuart and Joan should have had little in common. The son of a garage owner, he was born into a happy and comfortable home in 1939 in north-east Scotland and was inspired to become an actor in 1955. ‘James Dean had just died in a car crash and I thought I could take over,’ he laughs. ‘So did about 700,000 other young men. I was so naive.

‘Joan was a brilliant actress. Much better than me. She just lacked the killer instinct to go far.’

Joan was born in Australia in 1941. Her mother died when she was four and her father married again, but she didn’t get on with her difficult stepmother. She was 23 when she came to England to seek a better life. She passed an audition for the Bristol Old Vic theatre company and met another jobbing actress taken on at £7 a week – Jane Asher.

The two women became inseparable when the company went on a six-month world tour that included performing on Broadway in New York.

‘They really clicked as friends,’ ¬Stuart recalls. ‘At the time, Jane was the long-time girlfriend of Paul McCartney. But when they met, Joan was newly arrived from Australia and had never heard of The Beatles.’

After leaving the Bristol Old Vic in the Sixties, Joan moved to Scotland and the small theatre company that rehearsed that day in Edinburgh – and later fell in love with Stuart.

Just before their marriage, Stuart told her his secret.

‘Before I met her I had had a relationship with another actress who had become pregnant. Our relationship didn’t work out and the baby girl had been adopted. Joan took it very well.’

After their quiet marriage at a ¬register office, they lived for a year in Asher’s family home in Central London. ‘We paid only ten shillings a week rent,’ Stuart says. ‘We then rented a one-bedroom flat in Tooting where we stayed throughout our married life. It never became too small as we didn’t have children. They just didn’t happen.

‘We never had much money, but after my fee for being in the Yorkie Bar advert, we managed to buy a tiny stone cottage in the Midi district of France and went there whenever we could. We weren’t bothered about the precariousness of the acting world. If we needed money, we’d get a different type of job. At one time, Joan sold cigarettes in Woolworths and I was a lorry driver.

‘We used to work all round the country. We performed together in Lock Up Your Daughters in Newcastle, for example, and I directed a play in Cheltenham and later did some TV including The Bill and Dr Finlay’s Casebook.’

Then, 25 years ago and completely out of the blue, Stuart was contacted by the mother of his child to say his daughter had traced her and wanted to meet her father. ‘We met for a drink. She was 19. We got on really well and over time got to really love each other. She is now married with two children. Luckily Joan and my daughter clicked too.’

Joan had by then decided she was fed up with acting and wanted to do something with plants and gardens, so they sold their house in France and used the money to buy a garden centre in South London. ‘She loved it but it was very hard work so I joined her as a partner and we worked together. We called it The Independent Republic of Patio. ¬People used to come in and sit and feel at peace. It was heaven for us.’

Stuart sold it a month before Joan died.

The first sign that Joan was not well came six years ago when she kept losing her balance. Stuart says: ‘A few months later she suddenly screamed for me. I rushed into the hall and found her about to keel over. Luckily I caught her. ’

She was taken to St George’s Hospital in Tooting and was originally diagnosed with a heart attack, then a stroke. ‘Eventually a French doctor said she thought it was corticobasal degeneration – a degeneration of the middle part of the brain. Joan was also displaying some symptoms of Parkinson’s.

‘Her old friend Jane, who is president of Parkinson’s UK, recommended a professor at The National Hospital for Neurology in London. Joan went in a week at a time for tests and was eventually diagnosed with Pick’s disease, which, as the French doctor predicted, would only be confirmed after she died.

‘I then became her full-time carer. I did all the cooking, washed her and did her hair and all the intimate things, which was OK for me but undignified for her. Social services used to come round but we both hated it, especially when some of them patronisingly called her ‘‘sweet pea’’. We were a very independent couple.’

Stuart rarely left her side. ‘I only went out to rush to Waitrose, or occasionally for an hour or so to do some watercolour painting in my shed in the garden. I rigged up a bell so she could ring if she needed me.

‘Physically she was so stiff and in such pain in the end that she could move only one hand slightly. Even holding a fork became impossible and she often couldn’t get to the commode in time. She deteriorated mentally too.

‘Then, last autumn, the doctor told me she had three months at best to live. Part of me knew she would eventually have to go into a hospice and be fed by tube, but neither of us wanted that. I knew they would look after her but they wouldn’t love her like I did and I didn’t want anyone else to care for her. ’

He remembers little about the days after Joan’s death. ‘The first thing I remember is being charged with murder in Sutton police station. At the time I didn’t know what they were talking about.’

He was kept in a police cell for two nights and then remanded to Belmarsh Prison where, at first, he was terrified.

‘There were three of us in a two-man cell. They were probably murderers but then that is what they called me.’

He organised Joan’s humanist funeral on February 18 this year from prison but was refused permission to go. Jane Asher spoke at the funeral. She said: ‘I have never seen two ¬people more entirely and devotedly in love . . . anyone could see they were a couple who would be together as long as fate would allow. ’

Joan’s ashes are now in a terracotta urn in Stuart’s living room.

He says: ‘I don’t regret what I did to Joan but I am sorry I didn’t succeed in killing myself, because it was our deal to go together.

‘She wasn’t like anyone else. I adored her but I don’t feel guilty. We both loved a Celtic ballad that had the lines “Oh that I could find me a handsome boatman to carry me over to my love and die.” ’

And he adds: ‘I like to think that I carried her to the other side.’

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July 1964– Beautiful Jane Asher photographed by David Bailey for Vogue.

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New!

Lovely Jane Asher seeing to be posing at her home in Wimpole Street, october 19th 1962.✨🤍

📸: Terry Disney / Daily Express/ Hutton Archive/

Getty Images.

These photos excite me because a month ago, I subscribed to the British Newspaper Archive where I have saved over 100 new pictures of Jane and one of them is a version of these ones (different pose). I am looking forward to start posting those pictures once all my scheduled posts gets to be posted and I will post the newspapers individually as I believe they add more value to be shared on it’s own! There’s some in low quality that I’ll see if I share it with other pictures or alone hoping it’ll get a good response from tumblrs algorithm. 🌻 Nonetheless, thank you so much for the wonderful support this account has gotten this far!