She was born in Wandsworth, London to her parents Nigel Lawson and Vanessa Salmon. Nigella’s father was a future Conservative MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher’s government. Her mother was a socialite[8] and the heiress to the J. Lyons and Co. fortune. Both Nigella’s parents were from Jewish families and divorced in 1980 when Nigella was 20.
They both remarried: her father to a House of Commons researcher, Therese Maclear until 2008, and her mother, in the early 1980s, to philosopher A. J. Ayer until her mother’s death. Nigella’s mother died of liver cancer in Westminster, London at the age of 48.
