Nigella: I can’t hide I’m 60 as everyone saw me hit 30
FOR many women, their 60th birthday marks a somewhat unwelcome milestone. However, Nigella Lawson, who turns 60 today, is determined to embrace it.
Others may pretend to be younger, but the TV cook hasn’t been able to tinker with the truth since her 30th birthday party, having deliberately written her age on the invitations.
She said: ‘I wanted to be open about my age to stop myself ever being able to lie about it!’ She added she had ‘fought fiercely’ against feeling ashamed of her age, and found turning 60 ‘odd’.
Miss Lawson – who hosted her first show in 1999 – said: ‘I had been brought up, as many women are, to feel getting old was something to be ashamed of. I knew it was something I had to resist – and resist I do.
But even without thinking that getting old is a personal failing, it takes some getting used to.’
She also revealed she felt like a traitor when she turned 49 because she was older than her mother, Vanessa Salmon, had been when she died at 48 in 1985.
Miss Lawson told the Sunday Times Style magazine: ‘This is something anyone who becomes older than a same-sex parent will know. I was rather relieved no longer to be 49 – that year that made me a traitor to my mother.’
She also lost her 32-year-old sister, Thomasina, to breast cancer in 1993 and her first husband, John Diamond, to throat cancer eight years later at 47.
She said: ‘When you have seen people you love die young, the idea of complaining about getting older is just revolting.’