When Eddie Redmayne began researching his leading role as turn of the 20th century transgender artist Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl, the first port of call for the Oscar-winning actor was April Ashley, MBE.

Now 80 years old, Ms Ashley was one of the earliest British people known to have had gender reassignment surgery and Redmayne thought if he was going to tell the story of Lili’s journey as a transgender pioneer, she would be able to help him navigate some of the emotional terrain he was headed towards, as well as provide crucial insight into an era long before Vanity Fair put transgender women on its cover and the words Caitlyn Jenner broke the internet.

“What was important for me was that this was a period piece,” Eddie told me when I interviewed him earlier this year about his role in the film released next week. “So it was about meeting people of different generations.” However, just prior to taking April out for lunch, an unusual family connection appeared. “When I told my dad I was going to meet her, he goes, ‘you know, I think I actually danced with her.’”

April Ashley at home in Fulham Credit: Geoff Pugh

When they finally met and Eddie passed on his father’s thanks for “all the lovely dances they had together at Tramp”, April recalled him instantly and began sharing the stories from her time in the West End nightclubs of the 60s. The meeting was to prove invaluable – with her also giving Eddie strict instructions on vocal coaching. “She said, ‘don’t go up. No, no. Don’t go to a higher register. Just find your own voice, use softness, use tone.’” His journey to becoming Lili Elbe had begun. “Yes, that was a fun lunch with April. She’s amazing.”

Indeed she is. Ms Ashley can now add the infant stages of a Golden Globe-nominated performance to her extraordinary life’s work and repertoire, one that defied its epoch. Speaking from her small flat in Fulham, west London, today, she says of that lunch with Eddie: “I was terribly amused. I thought, ‘God, I must have been p*****, because I never liked to dance with anybody. His father must have been as good looking as he is. I just liked hanging onto the bar.”

Ms Ashley was born George Jamieson in working class Liverpool in 1935. One of six, as far back as she can remember she underwent “systematic bullying and taunting about my feminine good looks”. Her mother would beat her on a daily basis – once so hard that the police found a wound on April’s back deep enough for an officer to stick his thumb into. “It was a very difficult childhood,’ she says, “because my mother hated me and my brothers and sisters didn’t want anything to do with me. They all thought that I was so strange.”

Eddie Redmayne in character as Lili Elbe in the film The Danish Girl Credit: UPI Media

She left home at 15, heading first to the Navy, then to the drag bars of Paris, where she earned notoriety and some fame as a dancer, before decamping to Casablanca for gender realignment surgery in 1960. She describes that day as “the happiest of my life.” She was told the operation, which had not long existed, had a 50/50 chance of survival, another factor that Redmayne took into account with his research. “The bravery that it took to undergo a surgery in which there was a high, high chance of death,” he said, “that courage in your need to be authentic and to be yourself has another level.”

Ashley’s surgeon was George Barou. When she met his son Alain a couple of years ago, “I said to him, ‘your father made me one of the happiest people in the world the day he operated on me.’ Even to this day, there is still a bit of joy left when I get up in the morning thinking about what he did for me. I shall never forget him.”

After transitioning, she earned success in the British modelling industry. “I was photographed by everybody: by Terence Donovan, Bailey, O’Neill, Duffy, Richard Dormer.” And for a brief spell she was Vogue’s favourite underwear model. “Because I was so tall, all the photographers were on my side. They were always incredibly nice to me. And, by the way, I never hid who I was. I never denied my past.”

Caitlyn Jenner on the front cover of Vanity Fair Credit: Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair

A year later, however, her transition made the cover of the Sunday People magazine, and everything was to change. If the media coverage of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender change has seen her fame peak for all the right reasons, in Ashley’s case the opposite was true. The 60s may have been swinging but they did not quite swing that far, and April’s work dried up overnight. “I went to my agency,” she says, “and was told, ‘you will never work in England again.”’

At the time she was on the verge of breaking into film. “I’d just started doing movies. I did Road to Hong Kong with Bob Hope and Joan Collins and Dorothy Lamour. They gave me a part and just before filming they found out who I was.” Another career ending loomed into site. “They tried to sack me. The six girls that I was working with said, ‘well, if April goes, we go too’. Which I thought was the most marvellous gesture. Of course, they took my name off the credits.”

Suddenly and alarmingly jobless, Ashley made ends meet as a Chelsea restaurant hostess. “I started applying for jobs in shops. Sometimes I would get very polite letters back saying, ‘sorry, we don’t need anybody’. Or I would get quite blunt letters saying, ‘we don’t want people like you working for us.’”

George Jamieson as a teenager Credit: Daily Express

She moved to Spain for a while, where she modelled in the presence of the Duchess of Alba (“and they paid me three times the amount because of who I was”) and then America. She married twice, first to the Hon. Arthur Corbett, later Third Baron Rowallan, a union that was subsequently annulled in court on the basis that April was a man. “The judge behaved appallingly to me,” she says.

She then wed Jeffrey West on the RMS Queen Mary in California.

It was not until 2005 that she received her birth certificate as a woman, after the passing of the Gender Recognition Act 2005, and with some intervention from John Prescott. She has always relied on the kindness of strangers.

Ashley had her own brush with Vanity Fair in the 90s, when the magazine sent her to Monte Carlo to be photographed for a story. “It was a very famous photographer but unfortunately he was ill and so I had to be driven over to St Tropez where some poor Count took photographs. But they canned the article and the pictures didn’t appear,” she says.

If the magazine’s audacious Caitlyn Jenner cover story earlier this year represented a watershed moment, for Ashley the tidal wave of emotions underneath the imagery was more salient. Watching the former Bruce Jenner when he was a superstar Olympian in the 70s, she “recognised a fellow traveller”. And when she saw the Vanity Fair pictures of him as Caitlyn, she thought: “What a terrible thing you must have put yourself through. It can only be described as hell, emotionally.”

George Jamieson became the model April Ashley Credit: Vic Singh/Rex Features

The world of film, television and glossy magazines is now embracing the transgender community like never before, and April’s own story was brought to something of a circuitous ending earlier this year when the city of Liverpool made her a Citizen of Honour. She was awarded an MBE two years ago for her services to transgender equality, and an exhibition, April Ashley: Portrait of a Lady, which ran at the Museum of Liverpool until March, will transfer to London next year.

Such moments of redemption are dotted through her colourful, industrious and frequently extraordinary life. Yet it was her own father’s death bed acceptance that mattered most, adding the only note of familial kindness to her tale. “When he was dying, I walked into his room and he had never seen me dressed as a woman. He just gave me this beauteous smile and said, ‘darling, I always knew.’”

Throughout it all, she says, what has saved her has been her humour, a trait evident in the one complaint she has about Jenner’s turn as cover girl.

“There’s an awful lot of airbrushing goes on these days,” she says. “Nobody seems to have a wrinkle anymore. I’m the only person who seems to have them.” And she’s earned each and every one.