My father, Richard, was a well-respected consultant physician and brilliant teacher and writer. He first described and named Munchausen’s syndrome, and numbered Oliver Sacks, Jonathan Miller and Roger Bannister among his students. I adored him and grew up listening to fascinating descriptions of his patients and their illnesses around the dinner table. My favourite bedtime reading was Tales from the London hospital, a grisly collection that included the extraordinary story of the “Elephant Man”. At my insistence, my father took me to see Joseph Merrick’s skeleton in the hospital museum.
Hospitals, strangely, give me a little frisson of positive excitement. It is probably because, as children, every Christmas morning we would go with my father to Central Middlesex hospital, where he worked, and visit each ward, where we would be encouraged to take presents off the tree. When we reached his own ward, he would put on a white chef’s hat and carve a giant turkey to distribute to the patients, while the nurses sang carols. That’s probably why I have that unusual reaction to hospitals. Three times that sense of anticipation has been fulfilled by the birth of my children, but otherwise it has been a letdown.
My first memory is of being on a film set. It was Mandy, a film about a deaf child, starring a brilliant young actress called Mandy Miller. I was five. It wasn’t just acting I learned at a young age. The official chaperone who looked after me on tour when I played Wendy in Peter Pan at the age of 15 taught me to smoke, and the Lost Boys taught me a few other things in the confines of the tiny wendy house they built around me every night.
If I hadn’t been an actress, I would have been a doctor. I am sure it is no coincidence that all the voluntary work I have done over the years involving autism, arthritis and Parkinson’s disease is all medically based. I’m a science groupie – the only magazine I take is the New Scientist and the only club of which I’m a member is the Royal Society of Medicine.
My mother, Margaret, was an oboist. An orchestral player for much of her life, she turned to teaching once she had my brother, sister and me, and we would often arrive home from school to the sound of Bach, Handel or badly played scales. She loved us all unconditionally and was full of praise – together with my father’s more realistically critical views, they were the perfect combination.
My mother was a good basic cook. But cake-decorating wasn’t her strong point and that, coupled with my showbiz instinct for making a big effect, was what led to my taking over the family celebration cakes and making them ever more personal and ornate. But if you’d have told me that, decades later, I would be writing books about them and running a small business, I’d never have believed it.
I was terribly homesick as a young actress. It was hard being away from home, and it is a such a cruel and precarious profession, in which humiliation and disappointment are inevitable. It is a very unnatural existence for a child. My husband Gerald [Scarfe, the cartoonist and illustrator] and I had plenty of tempting offers for our own children – I remember in particular when our oldest, Katie, was offered the part of my daughter in A Voyage Round my Father in 1984 – but we kept them well away from show business until they were old enough to know their own minds, heavily influenced by my dire warnings. In spite of my best efforts, Katie is now an actress and, of course, I am immensely proud of her.
Jane Asher stars in Eve on CBBC, Mondays at 5.30pm
