Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson was happily married to journalist John Diamond and together had a daughter, Cosima and a son, Bruno. Diamond was diagnosed with throat cancer and died in March 2001, aged 47.

Lawson married art collector Charles Saatchi but filed for divorce, citing ongoing unreasonable behavior; the pair was granted a decree nisi, ending their ten-year marriage in July 2013.

Lawson supports the Lavender Trust which supports young women with breast cancer. She first became involved with the charity in 2002 when she baked some lavender cupcakes to be auctioned at a fundraising event.

Nigella Lawson was born on January 6, 1960 in London to Baron Nigel Lawson of Blaby, a former Conservative MP, and a former Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher's government, and his ex-wife, Vanessa, a wealthy socialite.

She had an unhappy childhood as she did not get on well with her father, and she became friendly with her mother who died of cancer at 48, only when she reached adulthood.

Her biological siblings are her brother, Dominic, sisters Horatia and the late Thomasina. She has a half-brother Tom, and a half-sister Emily - her father's children by his second wife.

She was an intelligent student who struggled with her schooling. She moved schools five times and eventually attained a Masters degree in Medieval and Modern Languages from Oxford.

Lawson originally worked in publishing, first taking a job under publisher Naim Attallah. At 23, she began her career in journalism after being invited to write book reviews for ‘The Spectator’.

She became the deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times in 1986 but did not want to be an executive and embarked on freelance writing career, writing columns on food and makeup.

’How to be a Domestic Goddess’, published in 2000, focused primarily on baking. The book sold 180,000 copies in four months, and she was invited by The Observer to be their social affairs columnist.

The ‘Nigella Bites’ series was later broadcast on American television on channels E! and Style Network. The book ‘Nigella Bites’ became the second bestselling cook book of Christmas 2002 in America.

In November 2003, she supervised the menu and preparations for a lunch hosted by Tony Blair at Downing Street for George W. Bush and his wife during their state visit to the UK.

Lawson decided to write a cook-book after she observed a distraught dinner party host. ‘How to Eat’, published in 1998, featured culinary tips on preparation and saving time, sold 300,000 copies in the UK.

She hosted her own cooking show television series, ‘Nigella Bites’, from 1999 to 2001 on Channel 4 and averaged 1.9 million viewers. Victor Lewis-Smith, a normally harsh critic praised her for being, “formidably charismatic".