Clarissa Dickson Wright has died, last of TV’s ‘Two Fat Ladies’

Clarissa Dickson Wright, the star of BBC’s “Two Fat Ladies,” has died. Christened Clarissa Theresa Philomena Aileen Mary Josephine Agnes Elsie Trilby Louise Esmerelda Dickson Wright, the television cook and author passed away Saturday in Edinburgh, Scotland, at 66 of an undisclosed illness. Her television partner, Jennifer Paterson, the other Fat Lady, died of lung cancer in 1999 at 71 during the production of the series’ fourth season. Neither woman was the sort to trade a long life for one poor in cream, butter or animal fat.

Wright, who was also a guilded butcher and accredited cricket umpire, began her adult life as England’s youngest barrister. She inherited a fortune upon the death of her mother but also began to drink heavily, running through her money and ending her law career. (She had been sober nearly 27 years when she died.) She turned to cooking, working professionally in various capacities, and was running a cookery bookshop in Edinburgh when she was fielded for “Two Fat Ladies.” The series, which ran from 1996 to 1999 on BBC Two and on the Food Network and Cooking Channel in the U.S., is available to stream via amazon.com.

In 2008, on the occasion of a DVD release of the complete “Two Fat Ladies” (Acorn), I wrote, “Unlikely even at the time, unfashionably large and unfashionably old stars Clarissa Dickson Wright (about 50) and Jennifer Paterson (around 70) have [little] to do with current TV cookery, with its urgency and noise, its rock-star chefs, their flare-ups and meltdowns. (Dickson Wright and Paterson never address each other or refer to themselves as ‘chef.’) Oddly, the modern show with which theirs has most in common is Gordon Ramsay’s ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ (the British version), for its travelogue aspects; celebration of regionalism; its uncomplicated though not un-complex dishes; and overemphatic disdain for vegetarians. There is also, as in ‘Nightmares,’ a narrative of riding to the rescue — though in this case, it is only that people need to be fed....

PHOTOS: Notable deaths of 2014

“They traveled the U.K. by motorcycle and sidecar, cooking for priests, singers, Boy Scouts, farm workers, aristocrats, and men who clean up after elephants. There was nothing nouvelle about their cuisine: They cooked not to challenge the palate but to satisfy cravings: To steal a phrase from Eliot, their food mixed memory and desire. The show is all bound up with history and tradition — the church, the village fair, the manor house, the family farm, the undeveloped countryside, where one might gather mushrooms as one may, and with the women’s own lives, which sound increasingly exotic as the stories pile up....

“They are full of wit and facts (that Catherine the Great nearly died of eating too many artichokes on her wedding day is something I know now that I did not know yesterday), and their food is full of butter and lard and cream. Of a Danish prune and apple cake, Dickson Wright says, ‘Just in case you think it sounds healthy, don’t be put off by that — it’s very good.’”

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Twitter: @LATimesTVLloyd