The Nigella effect

At 62, Nigella Lawson is happier than she's ever been and learning to go with the flow, count her blessings and revel in her solitude.

- SAMANTHA TRENOWETH

I first met Nigella Lawson back in 2018. She wandered barefoot down the tiled hallway of an old Melburnian manor and, just momentarily, a hush settled on the room. It was as if she’d cast the gentlest of spells. Photographers, stylists, caterers, journalists, we were all, for a minute, caught up in her glamour.

“Absolutely,” says Manu Feildel, her co-host on the new season of MKR (formerly My Kitchen Rules). “She walks through the door and the light goes on. She sparkles.”

Glamour. It’s an old Scottish word, originally intended to convey a supernatural, spellbinding beauty – the quality possessed by sirens in Greek myth or the girls from Beauxbatons in Harry Potter books.

When I mention the Beauxbatons girls to Nigella, she laughs, a very mortal, throaty chuckle. And suddenly the spell is broken, everyone relaxes. Because that is another of Nigella’s gifts – making those around her feel seen, welcome, comfortable.

“It’s not her gorgeousness (powerful magnet though that is) that’s the secret of the affection the readers and viewers have for her,” an old friend, historian Simon Schama, once wrote in The Financial Times. “It’s her deep well of authentic, unstuffy friendliness.”

And that unstuffiness stops her from taking her celebrity (she is famously one of very few British celebrities who need only a single name) too seriously. “I get embarrassed by too much fuss and attention,” she says, quite honestly, “because in a way it’s a distorting lens. We’re all just people, and that’s where we connect. You want to bond with people at that level.”