Nigella Lawson, the TV chef renowned for her coquettish persona, has denied being deliberately flirtatious on screen.
Over the years, the 65-year-old presenter and cookbook author has famously deployed a suggestive presenting style, including finger licking. But she said in a new interview that this persona was not intentional.
“I know that I’m quite an intense person. I don’t see it as vampy,” she told Times Radio.
Lawson added that television is an editor’s medium, meaning that many of her mishaps in the kitchen were removed from the final edit.
“They have to cut out an awful lot of me spilling things and cutting myself,” she said, adding that “you kind of lose your innocence after the first series because [before that] you’ve got no idea how it’s going to be viewed or judged”.
Lawson, who began her career as a journalist, published her debut cookery book How To Eat in 1998, before fronting her first TV show, Channel 4’s Nigella Bites, the year later. Plenty more books and series followed, including Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen and Simply Nigella, and judging roles on shows including Masterchef Australia and the US cookery competition show The Taste.
The chef is now often synonymous with culinary suggestiveness, thanks to her emphasis on indulgence and dimly lit kitchen settings, but she has often denied the use of innuendo or sexual undertones in her work.
Earlier this year, she told Salon Confidential podcast that she was baffled by her sex symbol status, saying: “I don't get the whole sexy thing. Often I am not wearing makeup at all.”
“If I've done my own hair, I don't brush it, I mess it up. Instead of brushing it, I tip my head upside down. I do try to do it sometimes, but I'm incredibly lazy. If people recognise me, I’m astonished.”
In 2018, Lawson denied intentionally using innuendos and accused audiences of “projecting” onto her during an appearance on the Australian TV programme The Project.
Quoting Lawson, Australian TV host Hamish MacDonald read: “My empty vessels are ready to be loaded, I adore the way it comes bulging up over the rim”.
Noticeably irritated, the chef insisted MacDonald’s suggestion that she deliberately uses innuendo was wrong, to which the host replied: “You have this way of saying things.”
Lawson responded: “I have this way of people projecting things on me. I’m so not. I don’t get it. I need you to explain to me.”
While Lawson has achieved international fame and sold more than eight million cookery books worldwide, she admitted that she thought her first cookery book, How to Eat, would be a one-off.
But she said that towards the end of writing it, she got the idea for her second book, How To Be A Domestic Goddess, which she said she intended to be an “ironic title”.
Lawson also admitted that she viewed her move into cookery writing as a late career change, having been a journalist in her twenties and thirties.
“I was 38 – I thought I was old. That is quite alarming,” she said. “But look, I’m still here.”
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