Born in San Francisco in September 1903, he began his film production career in Hollywood in 1919.
After joining the staff of Warner Brothers he was sent over to England as the managing director of their subsidiary Teddington Studios in Middlesex in the mid-1930s (where he is credited for discovering and seeing the potential of Errol Flynn when he was a young unknown actor who was hanging around Teddington Studios at the time looking for a way into the movies).
[1] Flynn played his first significant part as the lead in the now-lost Murder at Monte Carlo (1935), which was produced by Asher.
Asher went on to join Alexander Korda's London Film Productions where he worked on the epic The Four Feathers (1939).
Subsequently, he returned to Hollywood to work as a producer for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he earned his only Academy Award nomination for the 1941 Greer Garson film Blossoms in the Dust.