Nigella Lawson is a much-adored fixture on TV screens, but the star has had her ups and downs when it comes to romance. From suffering through grief to overcoming "abuse", she has also had her love life play out in the public eye.
Nigella, 65, has navigated a tumultuous private life at the same time as her career has flourished. She first became a household name with her debut cookbook, How To Eat, before fronting her own Channel 4 cooking show, Nigella Bites.
In fact, the star shifted her career from journalism into the realm of food and cooking thanks to the encouragement of her late husband. It’s an ongoing legacy as she has gone on to front numerous programmes internationally and sell eight million copies of her books worldwide, and continues to regularly share recipe inspiration with her three million fans on Instagram.
Death of first husband
Nigella met her first husband John Diamond, in 1989, while they were both working at The Telegraph newspaper. "I was a journalist - not a food journalist, but I did do quite a bit of cooking. As a consequence I cooked for editors quite a bit," she later told BBC Radio 2. "[He] said to me, 'You always talk about food in this really confident way. You should write about it!' So I did."
They married three years later, in 1992, in Venice, Italy. The couple had two children together, daughter Cosima, now 31, and son Bruno, age 29. However, tragically, John was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1995 and passed away in 2001 aged 47.
"I took a fortnight off," the mother-of-two told The Telegraph shortly after his death. "But I'm not a great believer in breaks. I don't want to be rattling around inside my own head. I did feel I was spiralling into a Kathy Burke character and tried going out, but I prefer it here.
"Filming keeps me busy. It absorbs me. Of course it is displacing certain thoughts but, in a way, I don't think grieving should be your full-time job. That seems a rather modern idea. To act as if you don't have a life is probably not sensible, especially when you have children."
Public breakdown of second marriage
In 2003, two years after John’s death, Nigella tied the knot again with Charles Saatchi, an art collector and advertising agency founder. He had been friends with her late husband since the late 1990s.
However, their marriage broke down ten years later. Charles, now 82, was seen in a picture taken by The Sunday People with his hand around her throat as they dined outside a Mayfair restaurant, and he accepted a police caution for assault.
Charles insisted to the Evening Standard that it was a "playful tiff". However, Nigella - who filed for divorce a month after the incident - later stated that her ex-husband had "grabbed me by the throat" as she detailed "bullying and abuse" in court during a fraud trial in relation to two of her personal assistants, as reported the BBC.
A happier private chapter
In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, Nigella revealed that she was "really surprised" to finally feel happiness, "because [she] didn’t think [happiness] was one of her gifts". When reflecting on her divorce, she added: "I’m not sure I would have thought I’d be a mended person, which I am."
Nigella is reported to have moved out of the seven-bedroom mansion in Belgravia that she shared with Charles and into her own £5 million Chelsea mews house after the split. She has not revealed publicly if she has dated anyone since or if she has a current partner.