Who is Prue Leith, the judge who spoiled the Bake Off final?
She's been tasked with taking over from the beloved British institution that is Mary Berry, but with her successes in food, literature and big business, it's unlikely that Prue Leith will wilt under the pressure. As The Great British Bake Off comes to a close on Channel 4 (with its ending reportedly ruined), here's everything you need to know about its new judge.
She may have just ruined the ending of her very first Bake Off
Whoever handles Leith's social media accounts will be breaking out their CVs today, as less than 12 hours before it was due to screen, the Bake Off finale appeared to have been spoiled.
Leith took to Twitter this morning with a spoiler-filled tweet presumably due to be published early Wednesday, which read "No one told me judging a #gbbo final would be so emotional. I wanted them all to win. Bravo [WINNER'S NAME]."
What a disaster. The tweet was quickly deleted, but not before news of the leak went viral. Within an hour, she had issued a rather sad comment: “I’m in too much of a state to talk about it.”
She's a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to food
The daughter of an explosives manufacturer and an actress, Prue Leith was born in South Africa, but it was only during her years studying at the Sorbonne in Paris that she discovered a love of food. After moving to London to train at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School, she decided to settle in the capital, launching a successful catering company and subsequently a restaurant named Leith's.
Restaurant success lead to Leith finding work as a food columnist for a host of magazines and newspapers, along with occasional appearances on television.
She's had TV judging experience before
Prior to Bake Off, Leith was a judge on BBC1's The Great British Menu, where she ranked and rated prepared dishes alongside fellow judges Matthew Fort and Oliver Peyton. Leith departed the series last October, presumably in order to move to Channel 4.
She's good friends with Mary Berry
While you may think there could be a rivalry between Leith and her Bake Off predecessor, both she and Mary Berry have been friends for over forty years, having both started out in television at the same time.
"We started together and we've been friends for a hundred years," she told The Sun. "There wasn't really competition because she was doing much more telly than me for a long time. And then I was doing more telly than her and she was doing all the Aga stuff. Then I started doing The Great British Menu and she started doing The Great British Bake Off about five years later."
She also revealed that, upon hearing that Berry was departing the show, she sought her approval before tossing her hat in the ring to replace her.
"When Mary said she wasn't going with it, I'll confess I thought, 'I'd quite like that job', so I rang her up before I took the job to find out about Paul," she said. "I was very anxious to know. She said he was lovely, so that was OK."
She's had a very illustrious second career in business
Not only satisfied with food, Leith has a smart eye for business, having served on the boards for a host of companies including British Rail, Safeway and Halifax, along with an array of smaller startup companies. She was also part of the Royal Society of Arts committee that turned Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth into a spot for ever-changing art projects.
"Because Leith's was a success, I started to be invited on to other people's boards," Leith writes on her website. "I was so flattered I almost always said yes, even though I knew that the chief reason for the invitation was probably that the Chairman needed a woman on his board for appearance's sake."
She's also a successful novelist
Along with her TV career and culinary ventures, Leith has written seven novels, all of which revolve in some way around cooking. Her latest novel, The Prodigal Daughter, is the second in a planned series of books revolving around multiple generations in a family of chefs.
Leith is also famed for her somewhat racy prose, leading her to be regarded as something of an EL James for the Saga set. Among her literary sex scenes include a muddy romp in a potting shed, and another in the back of a taxi. Asked last year quite why so many elderly readers gravitate towards erotica, Leith suggested it was because "they aren't getting enough".
"I often say to people that this novel is racier than this one, and let me tell you, most older women go for the racy ones," she said.
Her first marriage had a torrid beginning
Growing up in South Africa, Leith was hopelessly in love as a young girl with the husband of her mother's best friend. When Leith was 20, the then 39-year-old Rayne Kruger unexpectedly kissed her in the family kitchen, leading the pair to embark on a secret affair. She did feel guilty on behalf of her mother's best friend, however.
"Poor woman, she did think he might one day fall in love with a younger woman, but she didn't think he would fall in love with me," Leith told The Telegraph in 2012. "An old family friend whom she loved and who loved her. It was practically incest."
The affair lasted 13 years before the truth was exposed. Finally public knowledge, the pair subsequently married in 1974 and had two children. One, Danny, was once an advisor to David Cameron, while Li-Da, who Leith and her husband adopted from Cambodia, is now a filmmaker.
She boasts of having a rather rambunctious sex life
Since the death of her husband Rayne in 2002 at the age of 80, Leith has kept up an active dating life, last year marrying her "toyboy" John Playfair, who is seven years her junior. She has since boasted of their very exciting sex life to The Sun, claiming that the moment they touched one another's thighs during a theatre show made her think naughty thoughts "unsuitable for a septuagenarian."
"It's surprising how you can behave like a 16-year-old in your 60s, or a 17-year-old in your 70s," she said. "You know, it's exactly the same. You fall in love with somebody, you start worrying why the phone is not ringing and thinking, 'Can I ring him?'."
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