British celebrity chef Clarissa Dickson Wright, best known as one half of the eccentric television culinary duo Two Fat Ladies, has died at the age of 66, her agents said on Monday.
The former barrister, who had fought a well-documented battle with alcoholism, shot to fame in the 1990s with Jennifer Paterson in a BBC TV show in which the two women sped around Britain on a motorbike and sidecar searching for good food.
The show featured the two unashamedly large women with a raucous sense of humour enjoying butter-laden dishes and plates of red meat, with Dickson Wright once crediting the global success of the program as a backlash to “the health police”.
She died in a hospital in Edinburgh in Scotland on Saturday.
“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,” said a statement from her agents Elly James and Heather Holden-Brown.
Paterson died of lung cancer in 1999 at the age of 71.
London-born Dickson Wright started out as a barrister in London but her career in law was brought to “an abrupt end” by her battle with alcohol. Her agency said her birthday this June would have marked her 27th year of no drinking.
After leaving law, she worked as a cook in a London club and private houses, running a catering business and a cookery bookshop in Edinburgh.
