April Ashley: Model, actress, and trans pioneer has died aged 86
Actress, model, and activist April Ashley has been hailed as a "trance pioneer" since she died at 86. Ashley was the second British man to have sex reassignment surgery in 1960.
She then filmed for British Vogue and starred in Road to Hong Kong with Joan Collins. Ashley was named an MBE in 2012 for her campaign for the transgender community. Singer Boy George wrote on Twitter: "RIP April Ashley! Forces of nature and transsexual high priestess!"
The LGBT campaign calls Peter Touchell a "GREAT transgender pioneer for decades" and a "hero."
Ashley was born in 1935 to a working-class family in Liverpool, one of nine children, and entered the Merchant Navy as a teenager. After repeated suicide attempts, he was brought ashore and spent time in a mental hospital before moving to London and Paris in 1955.
During her stay in Paris, she saved money on sex reassignment procedures while performing at the nightclub Le Carrousel, famous for its drag stunts. She had surgery in Casablanca, Morocco, in 1960 and later said she was the happiest woman ever.
When she returned to the UK, she was given a passport and driver's license that identified her as a woman.
Ashley was shot as a model for Vogue, while her film career as an actress included minor roles in Road to Hong Kong with Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Joan Collins.
Ashley's modeling and screening career was cut short after a newspaper revealed she was transgender. However, she was not widely recognized as transgender, and her career stalled in 1961 after the Sunday People newspaper revealed it.
In 1963 Ashley married royals Arthur Cameron Corbett in Gibraltar.
His divorce in 1970 turned into a landmark court decision when a judge ruled that he remained a biological man and could not legally change his gender, annulling the marriage.
Despite the humiliation, he met again and opened April and Desmond's restaurant in Knightsbridge - but eventually, the attention he received from the lawsuit became too much. After a heart attack in 1975, he moved to Hay-on-Wye and beyond the west coast. From the United States.