Restaurant owner, chef, caterer, journalist, cookery writer and novelist Dame Prue Leith can add a new job to her long and impressive CV – she is now a stage performer, having embarked at the age of 82 on her first tour, Prue Leith: Nothing In Moderation.
The Great British Bake Off judge did a practice run at the Rondo Theatre in Bath last month, amusing the audience with tales of her exploits in London in the 60s and 70s.
Surprising revelations included rubbing shoulders with celebrities and royalty, and a party in Paris – where she was studying at the Sorbonne – she’ll never forget.
“A friend said to me, ‘There’s a party going on and I can get us both in,’” she says. “When we went in, there was a sea of bare bums bouncing up and down on bean bags. I was absolutely horrified and too prudish to join in. For an hour I walked around with my clothes on and everyone was like, ‘Get them off!’
“I thought I would be more invisible if I took my clothes off, so I stripped off and walked about pretending I was on the way to the bar or going to the loo.”
Previously, Prue had a rather more innocent upbringing in South Africa, where she attended a girls’ boarding school run by nuns and was more interested in horses than in men, at least for a time.
“When I was young, the thing I wanted to do was teach people how to ride horses. And when I was much younger I wanted to marry a horse! When I told my father, he said, ‘You do realise all your children will be centaurs?’
“But when I was 15 I realised boys were much more exciting than horses,” she continues. “When I got to 17, my father helped me fill in an application form to go to university. It asked for a list of hobbies and he said, ‘I think I will put “Boys” down.’ I was absolutely furious.
“Fifty years later, my husband said the same thing about our daughter and she came back and said, ‘Dad, all I think about is sex and shopping.’ I was not brave enough to say that.”
Prue talks honestly about her personal life during her stage tour, chatting frankly about her first marriage to property developer Rayne Kruger, who was married when they met.
“I had an affair for 13 years with the man who became my husband, and he was someone else’s at the time. I can’t pretend it was right. I never regretted it as I loved him and he loved me. It all ended well, but it was very painful for a while.”
Sadly, Rayne – with whom Prue had son Danny and adopted daughter Li-Da – died in 2002 at the age of 80. However, Prue found love again, marrying retired clothes designer John Playfair in 2016.
“I do recommend geriatric love,” she laughs. “One of the sad things about getting old is that so many think you can’t wear colour. I say just do it, and it is the same about love. What makes you think you can’t fall in love?
“I have only been in love three times in my life. The first was my first husband, the next time was when I was in my sixties and I fell in love with a wonderful man who was a pianist. I’m still very fond of him. Then I fell in love with my present husband.”
With a cookery career spanning an impressive 60 years, Prue has plenty of delicious stories about the people she met and cooked for following her move to London in 1960.
After attending the Cordon Bleu cookery school, she became a caterer, launching Leith’s Good Food, and then she opened her restaurant Leith’s in Notting Hill in 1969, which became popular with celebrities.
“The Beatles came in one night and wanted a full English breakfast. I explained it would be an expensive fry-up as we had a fixed menu, and they said, ‘Oh, we can afford it.’”
Leith’s also hosted Princess Margaret, as Prue remembers. “She turned up one night quite late, about 11pm, with two friends. Princess Margaret was every restaurateur’s dream – if she would grace your establishment, you’d think you’d made it.
"I couldn’t bear the thought of her being in an empty restaurant so I said to my waiters, ‘Half of you have to get back into your uniforms and go back to work, and the other half, scrub up as best you can and come in the front door and try and look like happy, sophisticated customers. The waiters pretending to be customers were having a ball, clicking their fingers and ordering champagne.”
Serving Princess Margaret wasn’t Prue’s only brush with royalty. As the in-house caterer for the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre in London, she was on hand to welcome Her Majesty and offer her a cup of tea during a royal visit.
Prue rang Buckingham Palace in advance to ask what type of tea the Queen would prefer.
“Her equerry told me, ‘What we do at the palace is we bring a silver tea tray. On it is a silver tea pot, a silver hot water jug, milk jug, bowl for the sugar and a cream jug. Then we pour her tea in front of her.’
“So I had to hold this heavy tea tray, and I had to stand at the end of a long line waiting for her. I took a Valium as I thought, ‘That will stop the shaking, perfect.’
“I asked if she wanted it black and I put a piece of lemon in and then she said, ‘No lemon.’ I got a cocktail stick and fished out the lemon, and topped it up with hot water. She then said, ‘I like it strong.’ Poor woman. I gave her weak lemon tea and she wanted strong black tea!”
Tea mistakes aside, Prue has had a phenomenally successful career and is still working on a variety of projects including her judging role on Bake Off, which she joined in 2017, taking over from Mary Berry.
“When Mary decided she didn’t want to do Bake Off any more, it did occur to me that I would love that job,” she says. “But I thought, ‘They’re not going to have another white old lady.’
And then I got the call. I was astonished. “It is the best job on television,” she adds. “I don’t have to write a script. I don’t have to rehearse anything. All I do is walk on, eat cake and say what I think, walk off and get paid. Fantastic!”
