Born at 126 Smithdown Road (then Sefton General Hospital) in Liverpool, Ashley was one of six surviving children of a Roman Catholic father, Frederick Jamieson, and Protestant mother, Ada Brown,[2] who had married two years before.

[7] After leaving the hospital, Ashley moved to London, at one point claiming to have shared a boarding house with then ship's steward John Prescott, later deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom.

[6][8][page needed] At the age of 25, having saved £3,000, Ashley had a seven-hour-long sex reassignment surgery on 12 May 1960, performed in Casablanca, Morocco, by Georges Burou.

[6][8][page needed] After returning to Britain, she began using the name April Ashley and became a successful fashion model, appearing in British Vogue,[9] for which she was photographed by David Bailey,[10] and winning a small role in the 1962 film The Road to Hong Kong, which starred Bing Crosby and Bob Hope.

They married in 1963 but the marriage soon deteriorated, at which point Ashley claimed to have a romance with Íñigo de Arteaga y Martín, the heir to the Dukedom of the Infantado.

[citation needed] In the 1980s, Ashley married Jeffrey West on the cruise ship RMS Queen Mary in Long Beach, California, US.

[13] She talked about her life at St George's Hall, Liverpool as part of the city's Homotopia Festival on 15 November 2008,[16] and on 18 February 2009 at the Southbank Centre.

In one interview she said, "This is the real story and contains a lot of things I just couldn't say in 1982", including alleged affairs with Michael Hutchence, Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, Turner Prize sculptor Grayson Perry and others.