Prue Leith on her affair shame, her trademark specs and being replaced by Nigella
The 86-year-old Bake Off star tells Jenni Murray everything on Saga’s podcast Experience is Everything.
The 86-year-old Bake Off star tells Jenni Murray everything on Saga’s podcast Experience is Everything.
Prue Leith has led a colourful and exciting life – and despite being 86, she has no signs of stopping. She recently announced she was stepping down as a judge on The Great British Bake Off as she wanted to take more opportunities that came her way without the commitment of being in the famous tent for 10 weeks each year.
But as she tells Jenni Murray on Saga’s podcast Experience is Everything, she’s thrilled that Nigella Lawson will be replacing her.
“They couldn’t be luckier than to get Nigella, because she’s everything the show needs her to be,” Prue says. “She’s confident, she’s a really good presenter, and she’s a good judge. She’s done quite a lot of judging of food and television.
“She really knows her onions and her croissant and her cakes and everything else. She’s a much better baker than I was ever. And people will just love her. Everybody loves Nigella, so I think it’s great.”
In the episode Prue also opens up to Jenni about her 13-year affair with her first husband Rayne Kruger, who was originally married to her mum’s best friend.
“It was a secret love affair,” she reveals. “It was quite incestuous, really, because he was like my godfather. He was a real father figure to me, and he was 20 years older than me.
“My mother always said that I’d fallen in love with him because my father had just died. But he was a wonderful man. Anybody would have fallen in love with him. And it was a terrible thing to do.
“Both of the families were very close, but his wife, Nan, who had been absolutely wonderful to me, and I’d lived with them and everything, of course, at the beginning, felt rightly betrayed and was furious with me.
“But in the end, we had lunch together, and she said, ‘You know, I actually understand you falling in love with Rayne, because when I met him, your mother [her best friend] said to me, ‘This will never last because he is 20 years younger than you and he won’t stay with you forever. He will fall in love with somebody one day when you are 60 and he is 40. Well, actually it lasted far longer than that because we had 25 years together and I was 70 when he fell in love with you.’ And she said, ‘But I understand. I understand.’
“And she was wonderful. They were both determined that the families who had been so close forever and often lived in the same house would stay friends. And so we did.”
When asked if she feel shame, Prue replies: “I do. I do. I think it was a completely wrong thing to do. But I also know I could not have done anything else. I was completely in love with him and with good reason. And anyway, it was a long time ago.”
After Rayne died in 2002, Prue – who had two children with him, politician son Danny and their adopted daughter Li-Da – was quite happy being by herself but in 2016 she married clothes designer John Playfair. She admitted she didn’t think she’d find love again as she was then in her 70s but says she is now embracing everything about getting older.
“I didn’t believe when I was young or even 40, 50, that you can fall in love at 70,” she says. “I would have thought, ‘That’s just nonsense, it’s all over for you’. But it’s absolutely not. It feels exactly like being 17 – you go back to being a complete teenager.
“People think that old age is all misery but it is absolutely not… I think a lot of it is an attitude that we’ve been sort of brainwashed [with] – feeling really sorry for old people, or feeling that they should shut up, sit down in a corner and knit, or that would have been what you’d expect your granny to do… But it doesn’t have to be like that, I’m really enjoying my old age.”
And she also revealed that she no longer needs to wear her trademark glasses after a successful cataracts operation but refuses to take them off.
“As soon as the operation was over, I could see absolutely brilliantly – sort of 20/20 vision,” she says. “But I wasn’t prepared to give up my glasses because I love them and I’ve had them for so long that they feel part of me. And besides which, I have a range of glasses and how can I sell glasses if I don’t wear them?
“And I love them. I do sometimes have reading glasses but if I’m not reading I wear ones without lenses. My daughter teases me because she says I’m too matchy-matchy because I always like it and it gives me pleasure. So when I’ve decided what I want to wear then I go and choose a pair of glasses of the same colour.”
Listen to Prue on Experience is Everything. You can also listen to other episodes featuring guests including Paul Merton, Alex Kingston, Tony Blackburn and Adjoa Andoh.
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