About Jane Asher: Jane Asher is an English actress, author and entrepreneur, who achieved early fame as a child actress, and has worked extensively in film and TV throughout her career.
I adore food and always have.
Listening to my regular favourites - Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and so on - I always feel, quite misguidedly, that nothing can be too bad if such beauty and brilliance exists in the world.
Having cakes as a business certainly changes things for me - I don't now sit at home doing a cake for the fun of it anymore. But it's an extremely happy and pleasureable business to run because people are generally buying cakes for celebrations.
I enjoy the crafts on the show enormously, too, when we have experts in showing how to make things. You watch them thinking you'll go home and do the things yourself, which is fun. Some I have done myself later on.
I look at myself objectively and in a way I see myself as a commodity. Your name becomes somehow outside yourself. Now, when I'm at home being Mrs. Scarfe, that's when I'm most myself.
I think all good writing is a struggle. To write as well as you feel you can has to be a struggle, almost by definition, because you could always improve.
Thank God I've never had the sort of intense fame that means you can't walk up the road. That sort of blazing stardom must be difficult to cope with and maintain; my career has just bubbled along happily.
I'm not advocating we should all be back in the kitchen and cooking all the time, because life's too short and we've got more interesting things to do. But to rediscover the intense pleasure of making a cake and putting it down on the table is ridicu...
Acting has been very useful to me.
I think one wants lots of different lives.
Of all the things I do, acting is the thing that grabs most, but there's another level on which it strikes me as being a little silly. In the end you're dressing up and deciding to be somebody.
An actor's job is about putting across the author's intention; I don't think of myself on the same level as a creator.
I do find modern jazz quite tricky.
As a child, I wanted to marry a farmer, but no doubt the reality would have been very different to the idyll in my head.
I swim more or less every day.
My parents were not theatrical at all.
I try to be classic without being mumsy.
I do enjoy fashion - a lot of runway clothes are pretty unwearable, but if moderated, the trends can be worn by just about anyone.
My mum taught me that redheads shouldn't wear pink, red or orange, but if you choose the right shade, such as a bright orange or a cherry red, it can look fabulous.
I know some actresses who used to be older than me who are now younger than me - I don't know how they do it.
