The questions Nigella Lawson refuses to answer

Ahead of her Brisbane appearance, Nigella Lawson reveals the intimate moments that happen during her show.

On screen in her addictively seductive cooking shows, Nigella Lawson is open and carefree, often welcoming you into her home in little more than a silk robe. But in reality, the velvet-voiced British television presenter can be intensely private.

Before U on Sunday’s interview with the culinary queen, cookbook author and writer, I’m warned to only ask her about her new speaking tour, An Evening with Nigella Lawson, cooking and food, and that she will not answer any questions regarding her personal life.

It is in stark contrast to the evening itself, during which her Brisbane audience will be able to ask her virtually anything. And their questions won’t be vetted beforehand.

“I don’t know who’s going to ask a question or who’s going to be picked or how,” Lawson says of the show’s second-half Q&A format.

“I don’t say to people, ‘If you want to ask a question, give it to me beforehand’.”

Talking to a room of people, whether about her latest book or her favourite hotel snack (a burger, if you’re wondering), words unfurl from Lawson’s mouth like ribbons of sabayon – luscious and free-flowing. Her vocabulary for food and manner of describing it is so rich and enveloping even the most culinary challenged among us want to reach for a spatula and saucepan.

Yet during our phone interview to promote her show at the Queensland Performing Arts Centre on February 10, she shows she’s not always so poised and polished, occasionally tripping over her words in her attempt to articulate herself in just the right way.

What she does reveal are some of the more intimate moments from her live shows overseas and explains she’s “not naturally a guarded person, I’m just guarded if I feel vulnerable”.

It’s not the first time I’ve interviewed the global food star and it’s not the first time I’ve been given such strict instructions prior. The first was in 2016 ahead of a phone interview, the second was last year when I met her for an intimate lunch to launch the new Westin Brisbane hotel.

Nigella Lawson f

There’s a slight intimidation factor that comes with being in the award-winning author’s presence – like she wouldn’t hesitate to smack you with a wooden spoon if you crossed her; yet there’s a deeply nurturing quality as rich and comforting as one of her hearty winter casseroles. And audiences love her – she’s engaging, visually captivating with her porcelain skin and doe-like eyes (even more luminous in person than on TV) and she knows how to charm a crowd.

Lawson’s barrier around interview topics is a guard she – some may say rightfully – put up after making headlines around the world in 2013 when photos of her being grabbed around the neck at a restaurant by her ex-husband, art collector Charles Saatchi, were published, leading to stories of domestic violence.

The controversy continued later that year when a court case, accusing the couple’s two personal assistants of fraudulently using the credit cards of Saatchi’s private company, revealed Lawson’s recreational use of cannabis. Lawson said in court cannabis “made an intolerable situation tolerable”, referring to her marriage. She also conceded she had used cocaine, but said any suggestion she was a habitual user was “absolutely ridiculous”.

As a journalist herself, having worked for British papers including The Sunday Times, The Observer and the Evening Standard. Her brother Dominic was also a former newspaper editor and her late husband, John Diamond, a journalist, so she understands how the press works and knows the only way to stop the questions about her eventful past is to refuse to answer them outright.

But it’s this blanket ban on personal probing with the media that makes her current stage show even more exciting for audiences. The production, which is currently touring Australia and will finish in Brisbane, is designed as an up-close-and-personal evening with the 59-year-old.

It’s divided into two parts: the first an interview with arts publicist Belinda Seeney, and the second, an open Q&A session. Unlike me, restrained and hamstrung by strict interview guidelines, audience members will have free rein. And that’s the way Lawson wants it.

Nigella Lawson and Matt Preston on MasterChef Australia.

“When I’m asked a question, I listen to the question and I respond to the question I’m being asked,” she says. “I don’t have any pre-made-up answers to anything … and that makes it interesting, fun and sometimes everyone’s having a laugh and sometimes it touches on darker things, you know, loss, because I think that’s a huge part with food. Often recipes or cooking (are) linked to people who are no longer with us, so I think (the shows) have a very free-range feel about them and that’s all to the good.”

While Lawson admits there is always a hint of nerves when taking to the stage, she says she feels comfortable enough to be herself and will always talk openly to her audience.

“I talk frankly because I want to,” she says. “I’m not naturally a guarded person, I’m just guarded if I feel vulnerable, and I mean we’re all vulnerable human beings, but I don’t feel that when I have a room full of people that I feel such warmth from.”

And part of that warmth comes from the audience’s intense protection of her. It’s something that became evident to her while touring the stage show around the UK.

“It’s quite interesting because once some man had obviously had a bit more to drink in the interval than maybe was required and said something that was a bit off-colour and I didn’t have to say anything because the audience (didn’t) like it,” she says. Their response felt like, “Please don’t do that”, she says. “But if I was ever asked something I feel uncomfortable with I would say, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I feel uncomfortable for these reasons’. I would be entirely honest.”

And it’s perhaps this honesty that has led her audience to open up to her during question time in ways she never could have imagined.

“The question I could never have foreseen that I would be asked and still makes me laugh is when someone said, ‘Should I cut my hair in a fringe or not?’,” she recalls with a chuckle. “I said, ‘No, wait till you’re 20 years older and you’ll need it to cover that bit’. So if anyone wants to ask me about their hairstyle, I’m up for that too.”

She is equally open to the questions – of which she says there are many – about cancer, death, grief and sadness. Lawson has lost three family members to cancer: her mother Vanessa to liver cancer when Lawson was only 25; her sister Thomasina died of breast cancer aged 32; and in 2001 her first husband, Diamond, who was the father of her two children Cosima, now 25, and Bruno, 22, passed away from throat cancer.

They are all things that have affected and shaped her life and have now become a point of connection to her audience, she says.

“If there’s someone you love so much and they’re not there and you talk to a room full of other people who are moved by that story, it’s like that person exists in the world for all those people too,” she says.

And it’s making these connections with her fans, whether it be over death, recipes or even haircuts, that is what her tour is all about, she says.

“I think (for) all of us in life, whatever we do, what matters and what makes a difference in our life is connection,” she says genuinely.

“Yes, it (the show) can be entertaining and we can all laugh. And sometimes, especially if it’s been a bit dark, I will try to make it a bit funny. But nevertheless – and I don’t do stand-up or anything – but nevertheless it is that sense of connection.

“It’s life enhancing, which is an overused word, but it is life enhancing to me.”

Nigella Lawson

In fact, the curvaceous beauty says every show makes her feel uplifted and energised.

“You get so much back, you do, from people,” she says buzzing with passion. “I think everything has to be a teeny bit nervous making – that’s life, you have to feel that. But I do think you get an awful lot back from people. It gives me energy, it doesn’t drain it.”

Bringing about an equally adoring trill in her voice is the mention of her children, although she is extremely careful not to reveal too much about them.

“I talk about my children in terms of food – but (I wouldn’t talk) too personally about my children because they wouldn’t enjoy that,” she says.

“They are their own private people and I respect that privacy.”

What she will say, though, is how much she adores cooking for them.

“I always love feeding my children whenever they come home – I love that – and their friends, that always gives me pleasure,” she says.

“There’s a particular meat sauce that I do in a different way and I keep meaning to write a recipe for it but I love doing it at home so much, and my children love it, that (when) I start writing down the first few ingredients … I just think, ‘I don’t want to pay attention (to it) in this way’ so I’ll probably never write up the recipe even though I do enjoy cooking it.”

And it’s dishes like these and cooking for people she loves that Lawson says will ensure she never tires of food.

“If ever I feel like I’ve been doing too much, the thing for me that makes it feel so freeing is when I’m just cooking and I’m not weighing or measuring anything because I’m not having to write it down or write up a recipe and that’s what I like,” says the author of 12 cookbooks and host of 10 TV series.

“And similarly, even though I enjoy doing the filming, when I stop or I go home in the evening from filming it feels so liberating cooking something without having to worry about which hand I’m using or whether I’m blocking a camera.”

But having spent a large part of the past 12 months travelling the world with her tour, food events and filming guest spots on TV shows like MasterChef Australia, Lawson says she is looking forward to getting back in the kitchen.

When she finishes her final gig in Brisbane, she has marked out three months in her diary to simply be home and play around with a few new cookbook ideas and also try to develop one of her ideas for a TV show.

She also has plans for a pottery course with friends and celebrity chefs Yotam Ottolenghi and Peter Gordon, plus her cookbook designer, after dabbling in pottery previously.

“Can I just say now, I’m not talented at all. I really am not,” she says, almost embarrassed. “I thought it would feel like cooking and it doesn’t.

“I don’t think I can ever go back to the wheel. The wheel defeated me. I thought it would be this wonderful experience where you felt at one with the wheel and I felt the wheel was my enemy,” she laughs.

While she critiques herself unjustifiably harshly, you can find a few of her creations in her latest book, At My Table. Turn to the recipe “Subverting the Spiraliser” and you will find a deep blue plate she crafted, while her recipe for coconut prawns features turmeric yoghurt in one of her handmade bowls.

“I thought it would be (calming) and it reminded me of being at the art room or doing sports at school. It just made me feel like, ‘Oh, I’m not co-ordinated and I’m not good’. But I love the company and we have a great time,” she says.

As for what else is next for the culinary queen, anything is possible, she says.

“What’s next is not a good thing for me,” she says. “I’m not a planner. I’m so not a planner. It makes me feel constricted. That can also be frightening. I don’t like the constriction of a plan but when I have no plan ahead then I always think, ‘Ahh, what am I going to do?’” she laughs.

“I need a bit of that, I know, and the rest has to be open.”

An Evening with Nigella Lawson, QPAC, South Bank,

Brisbane, Feb 10. Tickets: nigellaliveonstage.com