Biography
Nigella Lawson is a television chef and food writer from England. Her own cookware line, Living Kitchen, is worth £7 million, and she has sold over 8 million recipe books worldwide.
Education
Higher Kinnerton, a Welsh village, was where Lawson spent a portion of her childhood. She had to change schools nine times between the ages of nine and eighteen, and as a result, she described her school years as challenging. She attended numerous private institutions, including Ibstock Place School, Queen’s Gate School, and Godolphin and Latymer School. She worked for several London department stores before graduating from the University of Oxford with a second-class degree in medieval and modern languages as a Lady Margaret Hall student. She spent some time in Florence, Italy.
Husband
Lawson first met journalist John Diamond in 1986, while both were working for The Sunday Times. In 1992, they married in Venice and had a daughter, Cosima, and a boy, Bruno. Diamond died in March 2001, aged 47, after being diagnosed with throat cancer in 1997. Lawson preserved all of the press cuttings in her “Morbidobox” after Diamond’s death.
In September 2003, Lawson married art collector Charles Saatchi. The Sunday People revealed images showing Nigella Lawson being grabbed around the neck by Saatchi during a dispute outside a London seafood restaurant in June 2013. Saatchi was cautioned for violence after a police investigation, and Lawson departed the family home.
Lawson stated that Saatchi’s casual brutality and authoritarian behavior made her sad and prompted her to use drugs on occasion. In early July, Saatchi announced his divorce from Lawson, explaining that he had “clearly been a disappointment to Nigella over the last year or so.” Lawson did not respond publicly, but court documents revealed that it was Lawson who filed for divorce, citing continuous unreasonable behavior. On July 31, 2013, the couple received a divorce nisi, thus terminating their ten-year marriage. They came to a private financial agreement.
Nigella Lawson Parents and Family
Nigella Lawson is the daughter of Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, and Vanessa Salmon, a socialite and heiress to the J. Lyons & Co. business. Her parents were both from Jewish households, and her given name was provided by her grandmother. Nigella’s family had properties in both Kensington and Chelsea. Nigel and Vanessa Lawson split in 1980 and remarried, with Nigel’s father marrying Therese Maclear and her mother marrying philosopher A.
Nigel and Vanessa Lawson divorced when Nigella was 20 years old, in 1980. They both remarried: her father that year to Therese Maclear, a House of Commons researcher (to whom he remained married until 2008), and her mother in the early 1980s to philosopher A. J. Ayer (to whom she stayed married until her mother’s death). Her father was a famous political person at the time. She attributes her sadness as a child to a strained relationship with her mother. Lawson has three full-blood siblings: Dominic, Horatia, and Thomasina, and her half-brother, Tom, is the current headmaster of Eastbourne College. Through the Salmon family, Lawson is related to both George Monbiot and Fiona Shackleton.
What Ethnicity is Nigella Lawson?
Lawson participated in the third series of the BBC family history documentary series Who Do You Think You Are? in order to learn more about her family’s ancestors. She traced her roots to Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe and Germany, surprising Lawson by not having Sephardi forebears, as she had assumed. She also discovered that her maternal great-great-great grandpa, Coenraad Sammes (then Coleman Joseph), moved to England in 1830 to avoid a prison sentence following a theft conviction.
Hannah, his daughter, married Samuel Gluckstein, a business partner of Barnett Salmon of Salmon & Gluckstein. They had several children, including Isidore and Montague Gluckstein, who created J. Lyons and Co. with Salmon in 1887, and Helena, who married him. Alfred Salmon (1868-1928), Nigella Lawson’s great-grandfather, was one of Helena and Barnett Salmon’s children.
Cocaine
The sisters alleged in court in early December that Lawson had allowed them to use the credit cards in exchange for their silence about her drug usage. The judge allowed questions about Lawson’s drug use as part of the sisters’ “bad character” defense. Lawson admitted to using cocaine and marijuana but denied being addicted, saying, “I found it made an intolerable situation tolerable.” The two sisters were acquitted on December 20, 2013. Scotland Yard stated that Lawson will not be investigated for narcotics charges.
Before the trial was over, Charles Saatchi allegedly launched a smear campaign against Lawson in the British media via PR man Richard Hillgrove. Hillgrove’s lawyers demanded that Lawson’s comments on his blog be removed. In court, Lawson stated that her divorce from Saatchi had created terrible conditions for herself and her family, describing Saatchi as “a brilliant but brutal man.”
After the divorce, Lawson claimed she was “totally cannabis, cocaine, or any drug-free.” Lawson was denied boarding on a trip from London to Los Angeles on March 30, 2014. Foreigners who admitted to using drugs were judged “inadmissible” by the US Department of Homeland Security. However, shortly afterward, US authorities encouraged her to apply for a visa, and she was granted a “waiver of inadmissibility” permitting her to travel to the US.
Weight Loss
She dropped weight by combining exercise and a healthy diet. She did yoga, which can be extremely good to both the mind and the body. Nigella’s diet consisted of decreasing her meal sizes and placing her body in a calorie deficit.
A calorie deficit, or when the body burns more calories than it consumes, is a popular and successful method of losing weight. But for Nigella, it’s all about enjoying what she does and sticking to her workout and nutrition plans. Yoga has been shown to not only boost one’s mood but also to assist burn abdominal fat. Nigella eats a balanced diet that includes plenty of greens like kale and avocado, according to her daily meal plan. She is not afraid to reward herself and is not rigid with her diet, preferring to eat what she wants while controlling her portion sizes.
Lawson Cookbooks
Lawson has a natural talent for cooking since she was a child, thanks to her mother’s love of the kitchen. She was inspired to write a cookbook after witnessing a dinner party host in tears due to an unset crème caramel. How to Eat (1998), a cookbook with cooking suggestions for saving time, sold 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom. It was named “the most valuable culinary guide published this decade” by the Sunday Telegraph.
Lawson is a top-selling British author best known for her books How to Cook Everything and How to Be a Domestic Goddess. How to Be a Domestic Goddess, her first book, sold 180,000 copies in four months and earned Lawson the title of Author of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2001.
She then hosted her own cooking show television series, Nigella Bites, which averaged 1.9 million viewers and earned her the Guild of Food Writers Awards for Television Broadcast of the Year and the World Food Media Awards for Best Television Food Show in 2001. The show spawned a best-selling recipe book, also titled Nigella Bites, which sold over 300,000 copies in the United Kingdom, according to Waterstones. The book was named WH Smith Lifestyle Book of the Year.
Nigella Bites was taped in her west London home and aired on the American television channels E! and Style Network. Lawson was well-liked in the United States, although she was chastised by some for being excessively flirty. Nigella Bites became the second best-selling culinary book in America during the Christmas season of 2002. Lawson also began writing a monthly food column for The New York Times and launched a profitable line of cookware called the Living Kitchen range, which is offered in a variety of stores. Her collection’s value has steadily increased, beginning at an estimated £2 million in 2003.
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