Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson is the daughter of former Conservative cabinet minister Nigel Lawson (now Lord Lawson) and the late Vanessa Salmon, socialite and heir to the Lyons Corner House empire, who died of liver cancer in 1985.

Lawson attended Godolphin and Latymer School and Westminster School before graduating from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with a degree in Medieval and Modern Languages.

She took part in the third series of the BBC family-history documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, in an edition first broadcast on 11 October 2006. She traced her mother's side of the family, the Salmon (originally Solomon) family (owners of J. Lyons and Co.) to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors in the Netherlands and the Rhineland of Germany. One of these ancestors, Coenraad Sammes aka Joseph, had fled to England to escape a prison sentence following a conviction for theft. Nigella was disappointed not to have Sephardi ancestry in her family.

Career
Lawson wrote a restaurant column for the Spectator and a comment column for The Observer and became deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times in 1986. She became, among other things, a newspaper-reviewer on BBC1 Sunday-morning TV programme Breakfast with Frost. She has also co-hosted, with David Aaronovitch, Channel 4 books discussion programme Booked in the late 1990s, and was an occasional compere of BBC2's press review What the Papers Say, as well as appearing on BBC radio.

Following slots as a culinary sidekick on Nigel Slater's Real Food Show on Channel 4, she has fronted three eponymous TV cookery series broadcast in the UK on the channel. She has had two series of Nigella Bites in 1999-2001, plus a 2001 Christmas special, and Forever Summer with Nigella in 2002, both of which yielded accompanying recipe books. She hosted a daytime TV programme on ITV1 in 2005 titled Nigella, in which celebrity guests joined her in a studio kitchen. The show was not well received by critics and ended after a short run. Besides her own cookbooks, Nigella is featured in Off Duty: The World's Greatest Chefs Cook at Home (2005). A third series called Nigella Feasts, based on her book Feast, debuted on the USA's Food Network in Fall 2006.

Her first biography, Nigella Lawson by Gilly Smith, was published by Andre Deutsch in September 2005, but was remaindered within weeks of release. However, a paperback edition, subtitled "A Very British Dish", was due to be published in the summer of 2006.

More recently in late 2006, Nigella did a show on BBC Two called Nigella's Christmas Kitchen. Two of the episodes secured the second highest ratings for BBC Two, with the third episode becoming the top show on the week that it was aired.

According to UKTV Food Lawson has a personal fortune in excess of £1.7 million. She was voted author of the year at the 2001 British Book Awards. More than 2 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide. She also has a profitable line of kitchenware, called the "Living Kitchen" range available at numerous retailers.

Popular culture
Her style of presentation is often gently mocked by comedians and commentators, particularly in a regularly-occurring impersonation of her in the BBC television comedy series Dead Ringers, who perceive that she plays overtly upon her attractiveness and sexuality as a device to engage viewers of her cookery programmes, despite Lawson's repeated denials that she does so.
She has also been featured on BBC One TV impersonation-sketch show Big Impression, where Ronni Ancona has done impressions of her, which mock and embellish the fact that she uses slightly exotic foods. For example, in one sketch, a recipe requires Phoenix eggs. In her act, Ancona also lampooned Nigella's tendency to present her recipes with over-description.

Personal life
Lawson married journalist John Diamond, whom she met in 1986 when they were both writing for The Sunday Times. They had two children, Cosima and Bruno. Diamond died of throat cancer in 2001. Lawson married art-collector Charles Saatchi in September 2003, and came under some criticism when it was suggested she had started her affair with him before the death of Diamond.