What Happened to Prue Leith? Where She Is Now (2026)

By CelebPaid Editorial Team · 9 min read

Prue Leith. The restaurateur, novelist, and Great British Bake Off judge is 86 and still working. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The Short Answer: Still Going Strong at 86

Dame Prudence Margaret Leith — born February 18, 1940, in Cape Town, South Africa — is 86 years old and still one of Britain's most recognizable food figures. If you're wondering what happened to Prue Leith, the answer is: she kept going.

Leith's career spans six decades: pioneering restaurateur in 1960s London, cookery writer, businesswoman, novelist, television judge on Great British Menu (2005-2016) and The Great British Bake Off (2017-2025), university chancellor, and tireless campaigner for better food in schools and hospitals.

At an age when most people have been retired for 20 years, Leith remains a working public figure — proof that some careers don't wind down, they just change flavor.

The Restaurateur: Leith's and Beyond

Leith moved to London in 1960 to study at the Cordon Bleu, then built a catering business from her flat before opening Leith's restaurant in Notting Hill in 1969. It became one of London's most celebrated restaurants — and the foundation of an empire: Leith's School of Food and Wine (1975), cookbooks, and a catering company.

She sold the businesses in the 1990s and pivoted to writing and public life — but her credentials as a serious chef (not a TV creation) have always set her apart from the celebrity-chef pack. She earned her authority in professional kitchens decades before the cameras arrived.

In 2021, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to food, broadcasting, and charity — formal recognition of a lifetime's work.

The Novelist

Less known to TV audiences: Leith is a prolific novelist. Her fiction — romantic sagas often centered on food, family, and strong women — includes Leaving Patrick, Sisters, the Food of Love trilogy, and more. She's published over a dozen novels, written alongside the cookbooks and the TV career.

Writing, she has said, is her private joy — the work she does for herself, away from judging tables and cameras. At 86, she continues to write, with new books still appearing.

The TV Judge: Great British Menu to Bake Off

Leith spent eleven years (2005-2016) as a judge on BBC Two's Great British Menu before making the move that made her a household name: replacing Mary Berry on The Great British Bake Off when it moved to Channel 4 in 2017.

Stepping into Berry's shoes was daunting — Berry was a national treasure — but Leith's forthright style, colorful necklaces, and genuine expertise won audiences over. Her partnership with Paul Hollywood (the stern technician to her warm authority) defined the Channel 4 era of the world's biggest baking show.

She remained a Bake Off judge through 2025, becoming — at 85 — one of the oldest working television presenters in Britain. Her eventual step-back was framed as a well-earned breather, not a retirement.

Personal Life

Leith was married to Rayne Kruger, a South African author, from 1974 until his death in 2002; they had two children, including son Danny Kruger, who became a Conservative MP. In 2016, at 76, she married retired fashion designer John Playfair in a celebrated late-life wedding.

She has been open about aging with verve: the bright clothes, the colorful glasses, the refusal to fade. Her public image — formidable, funny, kind — is carefully un-curated: what you see is what you get.

What Is Prue Leith Doing Now?

As of 2026, Leith — 86 — remains active: writing, making select television appearances, and campaigning on the causes she's championed for decades, particularly food education and hospital food reform. She stepped back from the weekly grind of Bake Off judging but hasn't retired from public life.

Her legacy is multifaceted: the restaurateur who helped change British dining, the teacher who trained generations of cooks, the novelist, the dame, and — to millions — the nice judge with the necklaces who made Tuesday nights warmer.

What happened to Prue Leith? She did what she's always done: kept cooking, kept writing, kept going. At 86, Dame Prue remains exactly herself — which was always the whole point.

The Campaigner: Food Education

Leith's longest-running cause is food education: she has campaigned for decades for better cooking instruction in schools and better food in hospitals — arguing, with characteristic bluntness, that a country that can't feed its children properly has its priorities wrong.

She co-founded the Focus on Food campaign, has advised governments, and never misses a chance to link the dots: the restaurateur who fed London's elite spends her political capital on school dinners. It's the least glamorous part of her résumé and, she'd argue, the most important.

The Chancellor Years

From 2017 to 2020, Leith served as Chancellor of Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh — the ceremonial head of a university, a role she took as seriously as everything else. She'd previously been involved with culinary education for decades through Leith's School of Food and Wine, which trained generations of professional cooks.

Education, in other words, isn't a late-life hobby: it's been a parallel career since the 1970s, running alongside the restaurants, the books, and the TV. The damehood recognized all of it.

The Cookbooks

Before the novels, there were the cookbooks — and they matter. Leith's cookery writing, from the 1970s onward, helped teach Britain to cook: clear, encouraging, professional-grade instruction for home kitchens, from the woman who'd actually run the restaurants.

In an era of TV chefs who'd never held a service, Leith's authority was earned the hard way — and her books remain the quiet backbone of her reputation among people who actually cook.

The Necklaces

Ask anyone what they remember about Prue Leith on Bake Off and they'll say: the necklaces. Bold, colorful, architectural statement pieces — a different one every episode — they became her visual signature, as much a part of the show as Hollywood's handshake.

It's a small thing that says a lot: at 80+, Leith dresses with more joy and daring than presenters a third her age. The necklaces aren't vanity; they're philosophy — a refusal to fade, worn around the neck, every single week.

South African Roots

Leith was born in Cape Town in 1940 and has never hidden her South African identity — the accent, the directness, the perspective of someone who chose Britain rather than inheriting it. She moved to London in 1960 and built everything from scratch: the catering, the restaurant, the school.

That outsider's drive — the immigrant's need to prove herself — runs through the whole six-decade career. Dame Prue of Bake Off fame started as a 20-year-old South African with a Cordon Bleu certificate and no connections. Everything else was earned.

Frequently asked questions