Getting Dressed - Prue Leith
As a food tycoon and ‘Bake Off’ star, Prue Leith smartened up her act
Oh dear! No sooner had I finished writing about Jossy Dimbleby for last month’s Oldie than I realised that The Great British Bake Off was ending and I had to interview Prue Leith.
‘Too many cooks’ you might say, but I don’t think so. The only thing these two share, aside from their culinary skills, is a penchant for bright colours.
Leith was born in South Africa in 1940. She was sent to Paris, where she did a university course and earned money as an au pair; and where she first became interested in food – and clothes.
As a teenager, Leith had worn ‘what my mother called “bottom-of-the-pond” colours, dark and dingy. She had a pink ballgown made for my first school dance and I threw a sickie rather than wear it.’
In 1969, Leith moved to London and, with a Cordon Bleu cookery course behind her, Leith started making business lunches in her bedsit in Barons Court – luckily, her landlady had no sense of smell, she says. A decade later, she launched Leith’s Good Food and her own restaurant, Leith’s.
Her boyfriend, later her husband, Rayne Kruger – their union lasted more than forty years – was her guiding spirit and chairman. She had one posh frock which she wore for the restaurant opening but all her other clothes were either from M&S or home-made.
She remembers a sheath dress done in shiny black lining material, another cut out of curtain fabric. But, from then on, she says she was mostly to be found in ‘chefs’ kit’.
Twenty-six years later, having written newspaper cookery columns and twelve cook books as well as running her food empire, she decided to slow down and write novels and she sold her businesses – by then turning over a huge £15 million a year. (She used some of her profits to open a catering college in her native South Africa). But hers has been no languid retirement. Over the years since, Leith has been appointed to more boards than you could shake a furled umbrella at – from British Rail to the Halifax – and she has been awarded the OBE and the CBE, partly for work on school food. Becoming a tycoon required a more serious way of dressing, but Leith never fell back on the office palette of black or grey. She loved bright colours (‘I don’t have any recipe called after me, but there is a daffodil with my name’) and welltailored, simple, but comfortable clothes – the arrival of the trouser suit had been a boon to business women, she says. For years, her favourite garments were two plain jackets that she wore so often that they frayed at the cuffs. But when, a year ago, she married John Playfair, an ex-fashion designer, he found her a tailor (www. orhanlondontailoring.com) who copied them for her. (She wears one of them in our picture, with an Orhan shirt, Long Tall Sally trousers, and earrings she made herself.) Her new husband is a near neighbour in the Cotswolds but they decided to keep their separate houses. ‘I couldn’t live with all his junk – thousands of books piled up on the floor, chests of fabrics, his hat collection… I keep my own house quite tidy.’ Leith follows a disciplined schedule – she is finishing her eighth novel – and, though she likes to go to bed at about ten, she will stay up to 4am, if on deadline. The Great British Bake Off persuaded her to put on her apron again. A new cookbook is in the pipeline. Leith has her own stylist, Jane Galpin, who did her outfits for My Kitchen Rules, the TV series she left
to move to Bake Off. ‘In the past, I’ve had stylists who were too young and chose baby-doll dresses for me, but Jane understands. She gets that I have to be comfortable, in flat shoes – and that the combination of my middle-class, bossy voice, determined personality, glasses, and height (five foot eight) can seem formidable but can be tempered by wacky jewellery and bright colours.’
Leith has recently hired a personal trainer to help her lose weight – ‘I go to her studio to puff and pant.’
Forty years ago, she had the bags under her eyes ‘done’. ‘Now I could do with a neck life, face lift, arm lift, leg lift – the lot. But what’s the point? It is not going to make me young and beautiful and I would rather be me than risk looking like an alien.’ She has her hair cut locally, and coloured ‘in an obvious mix of fake colours’ by Ritchie at Billi Currie (www.billicurrie.com).
In the past, she has had her teeth whitened ‘expensively’ at the dentist, but now uses whitening toothpaste. ‘No idea if it works.’ Her beauty products are ‘Anything to hand – Boots mostly; just soap and moisturiser.’ Her reading glasses are hand-painted by Ronit Fürst.
Leith has succeeded in so many fields; I wondered which one she is most proud of? Surprisingly, it has nothing to with any of them. It is that she created, and led, the campaign to put sculpture on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.