Madhur Jaffrey CBE (née Bahadur; born 13 August 1933) is an Indian-born British-American actress, cookbook and travel writer, and television personality.

[3][4][5] She has written over a dozen cookbooks and appeared on several related television programmes, the most notable of which was Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cookery, which premiered in the UK in 1982.

When Jaffrey was about two years old, her father accepted a position in a family-run concern, Ganesh Flour Mills, and moved to Kanpur as the manager of a vanaspati ghee factory there.

A supporter of Mahatma Gandhi's demand for Indian independence from British rule, Jaffrey spent some time each day spinning khadi and delivered several large spools of thread to a central collection center in Delhi.

On 15 August she watched the transfer of power at India Gate and got a clear glimpse of Jawaharlal Nehru and Lord Mountbatten coming down Rajpath in an open horse carriage.

At school, the subject of domestic science included learning dishes like blancmange, whose bland taste drove Jaffrey to dismiss the cookery lessons as preparing "British invalid foods from circa 1930".

However, at the time of the practical examination, her class was asked to make a dish from an assortment of potatoes, tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger and Indian spices in a pot over wood to be lit with matches.

Jaffrey's father eventually returned from Daurala and joined Delhi Cloth Mills, a textile factory owned by the Shri Ram family.

The protagonists of Prawer Jhabvala's first novel, To Whom She Will (1955), a young couple who work at a radio station in Delhi and fall in love, were based on Madhur and Saeed Jaffrey.

[29] In early 1955, Jaffrey was in the audience at St. Stephen's College, Delhi, for a programme of literary readings by Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson, married English actors who toured internationally in Shakespearean productions.

[34] Jaffrey joined the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) with Diana Rigg, Siân Phillips and Glenda Jackson as her contemporaries.

Her father would send her a small amount of money periodically and her total income proved sufficient to live modestly in London.

[36] She rented rooms from at least two different landlords before settling down in a bedsit in Brent with a young Jewish family, the Golds, who allowed her to use their kitchen and their utensils to cook her own food.

In spring 1956, he approached Jaffrey's parents in Delhi for her hand in marriage but they refused because they felt that his financial prospects as an actor did not appear sound.

Saeed had just graduated from Catholic University of America's Department of Speech and Drama and had been selected to act in summer stock plays at St. Michael's Playhouse in Winooski, Vermont.

[1] Father Hartke also arranged for her to go to Catholic University on a partial scholarship and work at the Drama School library in order to meet her living expenses.

[45] In September 1957 Jaffrey stayed in Washington, D.C., with Saeed, who had returned there to rehearse for the 1957–58 season with the National Players, a professional touring company that performed classical plays all over America.

[47] The next day, they travelled to New York City where Jaffrey got a job as a tour guide to the United Nations, while Saeed did public relations work for the Government of India Tourist Office.

Saeed was then playing the lead at Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio in an Off-Broadway production of Blood Wedding, a tragedy by Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca.

Their performance was described by The New York Times drama critic, Milton Esterow, as "sensitive acting" that made up "the brightest part of the evening".

Sanford Allen, a violinist she had met when she was a guide at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, sent her a bunch of roses on her win.

[63] In order to better provide for her children, she became a freelance writer for food and travel magazines, covering subjects as diverse as paintings, music, dance, drama, sculpture, and architecture.

Geoffrey Kendal and his wife, Laura Liddell, had a traveling theatre company, Shakespeareana, that performed plays by Shakespeare pan India.

The hairpin bends on the drive there caused her nausea and vomiting, leading the crew to despair that a person so petite and sickly could ever play a glamorous film star.

In the 2009 Psych episode "Bollywood Homicide," Jaffrey played an Indian grandmother whose food is too spicy for the main characters to handle.

She appeared as the older version of the Indian super heroine character Celsius, in her civilian identity Arani Desai, in a 2019 episode of the DC Universe series Doom Patrol.

[73] Her editor Judith Jones claimed in her memoirs that Jaffrey was an ideal cookbook writer precisely because she had learned to cook childhood comfort food as an adult, and primarily from written instructions.

[75] Schiffrin passed on the book to Knopf editor Judith Jones, who had championed Julia Child's cookbook at a time when no other publisher would touch it.

[76] Judith Jones snapped up the book immediately, only asking Jaffrey to add serving suggestions and menus for people not familiar with Indian cooking.

Panayi commented that despite Jaffrey's description of "most Indian restaurants in Britain as 'second-class establishments that had managed to underplay their own regional uniqueness'", most of her dishes too "do not appear on dining tables in India".