Prue Leith lost her virginity to a "pushy" boyfriend when she was just 15.
The 78-year-old chef didn’t have a great first experience of sex but is thankful she found herself in a "good relationship" soon afterwards.
She said: "I was just weak because I had this rather pushy boyfriend who kept taunting me, ‘You’re such a baby. Grow up!’
"But luckily I had a good relationship soon afterwards and that was when I discovered that sex was great. I do think some people are more open to the idea of sex and enjoy it more than others, don’t you? I think my mother was like that."
When she was 21, the ‘Great British Bake Off’ star fell in love with Rayne Kruger, the 39-year-old husband of her mother’s best friend, Nan, and she admitted falling for him was the "wrong thing" to do but she couldn’t bring herself to walk away from someone so "wonderful".
She said: "It really was the wrong thing to do….
"Like all lovers, you say, ‘This is bigger than me, I can’t help it,’ and you justify it to yourself.
"I should have walked away, but I could no more have walked away from him than gone to the moon. But he was much older than me, and my father had recently died, and it was sort of comforting. But it wasn’t just that — he was the most wonderful man."
The pair kept their affair secret for 13 years, until Prue broke off their romance because she wanted a baby, only for them to then reconcile.
And the cook praised Nan for being so "wonderful" about the scandal.
She recalled in an interview with the Sunday Times magazine: "She was just the most wonderful woman. And Rayne was determined that everybody would stay friends.
"I thought, ‘This is impossible,’ and at the time she wrote letters to Rayne, which he would never let me see, and she wrote one letter to me, which he binned.
"He said, ‘We must all go on being nice to each other and we will end up friends.’ And we did."
Prue and Rayne went on to have son Daniel and adopted a daughter, Li-Da, but the writer passed away aged 80 in 2002 after a long period of ill health with lung condition emphysema.
She said: "By the end, he couldn’t walk very far at all and couldn’t go on planes, so his life got smaller and smaller."
Prue married again in 2016, to retired clothes designer John Playfair, 70.
However, the pair don’t live together but meet every day for lunch and dinner.
Prue Leith lost virginity at 15
