The feuds! The tantrums! The wives! Nothing’s off the menu in Hollywood biopic, superstar chef tells the MoS

HIS hell-raising antics are legendary. As haute cuisine’s chainsmoking, pot-throwing enfant terrible, Marco Pierre White is as famous for his fiery relationships and tortured domestic life as he is for his prowess in the kitchen.

With three Michelin stars for his restaurants, as many former wives, and four children to his name, his life story – peppered with angry feuds and marital high jinks – could have been written as a movie script.

And, sure enough, now his colourful journey from a council estate in Leeds to becoming the first British chef to win the culinary world’s loftiest accolade, is to be made into a Hollywood film by film director and producer Ridley Scott.

Marco has sold the rights to his bestselling autobiography, The Devil In The Kitchen, to Scott, whose films include Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Blade Runner and Thelma And Louise.

Kerryman Michael Fassbender has first option to play the rock ’n’ roll chef.

Speaking about the film for the first time, Hell’s Kitchen star Marco, who retired from professional cooking 15 years ago, says that Scott is the only director he wanted to portray his life on the big screen.

‘I’ve had lots of film offers in the past, but Ridley’s the only person I trust to tell my story,’ says Marco. ‘Ridley and his partner Giannina [the Costa Rican actress Giannina Facio, who made Gladiator with Scott] are doing the movie. They made an offer last year and now the deal is finalised and I’ll be working closely on the project.’

Scott has indicated that he is down to a shortlist of two scriptwriters and the film is likely to go into production next year.

Others tipped for roles include Daniel Craig – he is believed to be in the running to play Marco’s pugnacious rival Gordon Ramsay, who was once his trainee. Marco is the only person known to have reduced the equally fiery chef to tears.

Fassbender, nominated for this year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his part in Twelve Years A Slave, met Marco during the summer to talk about the role.

‘He’s a wonderful actor and quite extraordinary,’ says Marco. ‘We had dinner and he was incredibly cool. He just oozed charisma.

‘He has a magnetic energy and I would love him to play me. He has that fire inside his belly that I understand.

‘It’s a great privilege to have met him and to be working with Ridley. I’m just a cook, a Yorkshire boy from humble beginnings, so to have a movie made about my life is pretty incredible.’

If Marco sounds a tad more meek than his fearsome reputation suggests, it may be because, about to turn 53, he claims he has finally mellowed. In that respect, he has been helped by the love of yet another good woman.

She is none other than the English actress Emilia Fox, the 40-year-old star of television series Silent Witness and daughter of actors Edward Fox and Joanna David.

Ms Fox is divorced from her first husband, actor Jared Harris, to whom she was married for four years. She also has a four-year-old daughter, Rose, from her one-year union with actor and peace campaigner Jeremy Gilley after she split from Harris.

‘We’ve been together three years,

‘I feel very safe and loved with Emilia’

but we’ve been careful and the papers didn’t find out until recently,’ Marco chuckles. During the summer, he confides, they split up for a short period, but are now happily back together.

‘She’s a wonderful person and we have a very special relationship. I feel very safe and very loved with Emilia,’ Marco says.

‘I am very comfortable with her. We first met years ago and I’ve always enjoyed her company. She’s the kindest human being you’ve ever met. She’s a real person and without question the hardest working woman I’ve ever met, and she’s also an extraordinary mother. ’

While Marco may have toned down his wildman antics, the film will depict all the excesses of his younger days. It will begin when the young Marco, one of four children born to Frank White and Maria-Rosa Gallina – who died when Marco was just six – left his home in Leeds at 16.

He quit his comprehensive, Allerton High School, without any formal qualifications and arrived in London with ‘£7.36, a box of books and a bag of clothes’.

He had decided he wanted to be a chef, and having heard of the legendary Roux brothers, Albert and Michel, knocked on the door of their restaurant – Le Gavroche in London’s Mayfair – asking for a job.

There he trained as a commis chef before setting up his own restaurant, Harvey’s, in London, in 1987. Within a year he had won two Michelin stars for Harvey’s (he won his third aged just 33 for The Restaurant Marco Pierre White).

His work rate and his temper soon became as famous as his dishes, and Marco would frequently boot customers out of his establishments if they complained about the food.

‘I was struggling and searching for something, and I thought, “Wow – I’ll have a go at cooking.” I went on to achieve the ultimate in French gastronomy and, to this day, I’ve yet to dine in a Michelin-starred restaurant in France,’ he adds proudly.

As well as charting his culinary achievements and training of chefs such as Ramsay, the movie will also chart Marco’s turbulent love life. His first marriage to Alex McArthur yielded a daughter, Lettie, while his second – to the former model Lisa Butcher – ended during their honeymoon. He has yet to divorce his third wife, Spanish-born former waitress Mati Conejero, the mother of three of his children.

Theirs was a turbulent union. That said, his relationship with Mati now, is, according to Marco, better than it has been for years.

The pair met when Mati was a bartender at Canteen restaurant in west London. They were married in 2000 but separated seven years later.