What can you say about a woman who is beautiful, thin, and irritatingly good at everything she does; who is happily married, acts, bakes cakes and writes novels, makes her own Christmas decoration and was once Paul McCartney girlfriend - except that she sounds like a right royal pain?

Jane Asher is a conundrum - the allrounder who slips in and out of roles apparently at whim. In the 80's she was reincarnated as a sort of Super housewife, the woman who did amusing things with icing sugar, opened a tea shop and wrote 14 books on everything from easy entertaining to baby burping. In between all this were colour-supplement pieces on her in a cream suit, serving minted pesto potatoes, julienne vegetables and golden saffroned salmon pie, over a candle lit 'effortless dinner party' at her Chelsea home; snippets about the long and happy marriage to Gerald Scarfe the cartoonist; the three children; the new jobs as consultant to McVitie's biscuits and Sainsbury's; the charities...

..And furthermore, she has the cheek to look happy, for her eyes have just glanced off her latest creation, which is sitting on my knee: her first novel. It's called The Longing and her publishers are confidently expecting it to be a best seller.

..Her novel, 'written in bursts', took two and a half years to complete. Its protagonist is Juliet, a publicly respectable, privately rowdy, middle class woman who gets derailed from an orderly life by raging hormones in her desperate need to have a child which, despite fertility treatments, does not come. It is well-written, technically accomplished, passionately felt book about obsession and jealousy and lust.

..Jane has two siblings: Peter, now one of the top brass at Sony New York, and Clare, who is a teacher, married with children.

..'Don't get me wrong', she says. 'Of all the things I do, acting, in many ways, is the thing that grabs me 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 else. And it's financially precarious - you never know when you'll work again - so I was drawn to something that would give me a bit more control over what I do.'

..Also, says Asher, there was an eight-year gap in her life, after the birth of her first child, Katie, now 20, when a longed-for second child didn't appear. 'Gerald and I went to visit the infertility specialist Professor Ian Craft, although fortunately we didn't need any treatment and eventually nature took its course. He did, however, deliver our next two children [Alexander, now 12, and Rory 10].'

..She was brought up in Wimpole street where her father, an eminent consultant endocrinologist, had his practice. Her mother was professor of Music at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

Paul McCartney figured in her life during sixties when she was already an established actress. He bought her a socking great emerald engagement ring and wrote And I Love Her in her honour. In 1967 they split up. I tried to break a 30-year silence on Paul by asking, 'If tomorrow you opened a copy of the Sun and saw the headline "Jane - Wot a Scorcher" by Paul McCartney, would you then spill the beans?'

'Nice try', she says sunnily, 'but no, I wouldn't, not under any circumstances. I have a horror of people discussing their private lives with the press.'

Two years after she broke up with Paul, her adored father committed suicide by swallowing half a bottle whisky and a large quantity of barbiturates. When they found him, he had been dead for a week.

..One of the things she most likes about her husband, Gerald Scarfe, whom she met at a Private Eye party in 1971, is 'a kind of cynicism we have in common, a slightly satirical outlook on life - also he is very dishy and he makes me laugh.'

From a 1995 interview with Jane Asher in Good Housekeeping magazine.