A recluse at 60
Nigella’s wasting away
Once the thinking man’s bombshell, all dangerous curves and joyous wiggle, Nigella Lawson is a slender shadow of her former self. Not that the new slimline Nigella is in the public eye that much. Having just celebrated her landmark 60th birthday, she has all but dropped from view.
During the initial freedom years after her distressing split from second husband Charles Saatchi in 2013, you would see her at parties in London, hopping in and out of taxis and dining with literary friends such as Salman Rushdie. But, sadly, no more.
Christmas this year was spent in Cornwall with old friend and former Vogue magazine executive Fiona Golfar and her family before returning to her house in London for a quiet New Year’s Eve.
There hasn’t been a new book or television show since 2017. So, although Nigella once said that she needed to do a show “every other year” to keep her head above
water financially, she has opted to take a break instead.
Last year, she launched a food photography app, Foodim, and posts regularly on Instagram – where she has 1.8 million followers – but there has been nothing else new of late.
Lucrative endorsements, such as plugging Typhoo tea, have been allowed to lapse, while Kiwi chocolate company Whittaker’s “can’t confirm any details around our future campaigns”. Kiera O’Brien, The Bookseller’s charts and data editor, said, “She is still a big name, however, she is obviously selling an awful lot less than she used to.”
In 2018, the domestic goddess concentrated on the relaunch of all her books, publicising them with some “Audience With” shows in London and Auckland. But Nigella has always claimed she is “shy”’ deep down and that her coquettish screen manner is her trying to cover it up and gain the courage to perform.
It is telling that she has never watched her own shows on TV. Who could blame her, then, for being reluctant to put herself out there again?
She told friends she was writing recipes for a new book last spring, but there is no sign of a deal. In an interview she said that her previous success was “fear-driven”. Indeed, Nigella says she is at her most comfortable out of the spotlight.
“In many ways, I feel I didn’t choose this life, but I guess that’s what happens if you go on TV,” she laments.
She said last year that she was “interested” in the idea of abandoning cookery altogether to work with the terminally ill, adding, “It really interests me, that sort of work.”
Nigella nursed her mother, sister and first husband John Diamond through tragically early deaths from cancer. Mum Vanessa died aged 48, sister Thomasina at 31 and John at 47.
Recently she has taken up pottery, doing a course in ceramics at West Dean College, Sussex, and has been reclaiming her old pre-Saatchi life.
Despite walking away from Saatchi, who is worth $280 million, with nothing more than the contents of her kitchen, she is wealthy enough not to work.
She has joyfully returned to her passion of reading and says that her greatest delight is to be tucked up with a pile of books by 7.30pm.
She says, “If I’m not suitably banked by books, I start twitching. I am a binge reader.
“Now that my children are grown up, I regard the weekends as reading days – if I get anything less than six hours’ reading time a day, I feel it’s a waste of a weekend.”
In the Saatchi years, poor Nigella, an Oxford medieval and modern languages graduate, complained she had to read books in the back of taxis because when they were together, he wanted her full attention.
Sometimes there are parties but she no longer drinks alcohol, finding that it exacerbates her long-standing issues with anxiety.
She told a podcast in 2018: “I’m quite an anxious person and drink can really exacerbate that anxiety.”
She lives alone in a
$10 million semi-detached home in Central London, with kids Cosima, 26, and Bruno, 23, having flown the nest.
Her collection of nearly 4000 recipe books lines a living room wall from floor to ceiling.
There is no grand love affair – Nigella has barely dated since Saatchi. That he has been dating fashion expert Trinny Woodall, 55, apparently leaves her unmoved. A friend asserts, “Honestly, truly, she could not care less on any level about either of them.”
Life coach John Whittington has been advising perennially anxious Nigella about confidence. She’s also said to be a great fan of readings from psychics, and has also reportedly had hypnotherapy.
She has maintained her trim figure by conquering her habit of “anxious eating”, telling an interviewer in 2008: “I’m always so envious of those people who don’t eat when they’re anxious. I only have to be a little anxious and I overeat.”
There was no diet. Nigella just ate less and took up exercise, mostly to try to strengthen her bad back.
She said in 2015: “As you get on in life, you value feeling well as opposed to looking well. Yoga certainly makes you feel great and you want to carry on feeling great.”
She has a long-standing passion for reformer Pilates and David Higgins, an Aussie living in London, is said to be her guru. Nigella also does Iyengar “slow yoga” at home with a personal trainer three times a week. But emotionally, it has taken her a considerable time to recover from the horror of the split.
Saatchi was pictured grabbing her by the throat while they ate at a pavement table at Scott’s restaurant in Mayfair in June 2013.
The marriage collapsed, and was followed by the sensational trial of their former assistants, the Grillo sisters, who were found not guilty of fraudulently using company credit cards.
Nigella said Saatchi was a controlling monster who had practised “intimate terrorism”; he claimed she was a spendthrift and user of cocaine and cannabis, calling her “Highgella”.
Since then she has sold off her assets and reflected last year, “I always wanted to write that great big novel. I realise now, though, that I don’t have it in me. It is so much easier to write about food.”
At last the kitchen sexpot is living the life she wants on her own terms.