Acclaimed cook and MasterChef Australia favourite Maggie Beer is back in the kitchen this week. She’s setting a tough Pressure Test in which contestants must master her signature sour-cream pastry and turn it into a pie. Maggie loves returning to guide the next generation of cooks, but it is just one part of a remarkable career spanning five decades.
“I started cooking at 34,” Maggie, 81, tells TV WEEK. “I did four years of The Cook and the Chef and five years of Bake Off.”
But for the celebrated chef, food author, restaurateur and producer, some milestones stand out above the rest.
“Being made Senior Australian of the Year all that time ago in 2010 and receiving the AO were both pretty special,” she recalls. “There have been so many amazing things in my life, I have to pinch myself.”
Alongside the professional highs have come heartbreaking personal losses. After the death of her elder daughter, Saskia, in 2020, Maggie says she leaned on husband Colin and the power of the written word.
“I’ve always been a better writer than talker,” Maggie admits. “I would express my feelings by letter to any situation in my life that was really difficult. I would write it all down and that would open a conversation.”
Colin and Maggie have been married for 56 years, after meeting on the Victorian ski fields in the summer of 1970.
“I’ve never stopped feeling the same way – 56 years on, I couldn’t bear to be without him,” Maggie gushes. “My favourite thing about marriage is having had the luck of finding him.”
Speaking to TV WEEK while checking the ripeness of her quinces, Maggie says that, at 81, slowing down is still not on her agenda.
“There’s no word for retirement in my vernacular,” she says with a laugh. “But there is finding the balance of doing all the things I want to do – and not feeling that I need to do things.
“It’s time to let someone else get up at 5.30 in the morning!”
MasterChef Australia airs Monday to Wednesday at 7.30pm and Sunday, 7pm on 10 and 10Play.
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