One of TV's 'Two Fat Ladies' Dead at 66

Clarissa Dickson Wright died after a very full life
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 18, 2014 11:28 AM CDT
One of TV's 'Two Fat Ladies' Dead at 66
Clarissa Dickson Wright   (YouTube)

Both of TV's "Fat Ladies" have sung. Clarissa Dickson Wright, one half of the BBC's "Two Fat Ladies" cooking duo, died in Edinburgh Saturday at age 66, the BBC reports. Wright was a former lawyer who filmed four of the "Fat Ladies" series, going on food-related road trips across the UK in a motorbike and sidecar with Jennifer Paterson, before Paterson died in 1999 from cancer. The New York Times describes Wright as a "rebel," both hosts as "irreverent and eccentric," and the recipes as "sometimes confounding." Wright's eclectic working life also included stints as a cook, an author, and a cookbook shop manager; she also ran a catering business, was a guild butcher, and once worked on a yacht in the Caribbean.

In fact, she recently said, "I've had a fantastic life and I've done everything I could have wanted to do and more." It wasn't until her 40s, after she'd recovered from alcoholism, that she got into cooking seriously. As for the perhaps-controversial title of the show that brought her fame? "If you're fat you're fat," she once said. "I hate this modern-day political correctness, that you don't call things by their proper name." Her agent remembers Wright similarly in a statement: "Loved dearly by her friends and many fans all over the world, Clarissa was utterly non-PC and fought for what she believed in, always, with no thought to her own personal cost." There's no word on Wright's cause of death, but the Guardian reports that she had been undergoing treatment at a hospital since the beginning of the year. (More celebrity death stories.)

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