Jamie Oliver British Chef Born 1975 in Clavering

Early life

James Trevor Oliver was born on 27 May 1975 in Clavering, Essex, and grew up there. His parents, Trevor and Sally, ran a pub and restaurant called the Cricketers, and he learned to cook in its kitchen. He left school at 16 holding two GCSE qualifications, in art and geology, and then studied at Westminster Technical College, now Westminster Kingsway College, where he earned a City & Guilds vocational qualification in home economics.

Career

His first kitchen job was as a pastry chef at Antonio Carluccio's Neal Street restaurant. There he learned Italian cooking and formed a friendship with Gennaro Contaldo, who became his mentor and whom he later hired to help run his restaurant chain. He then worked as a sous-chef at the River Cafe in Fulham, where the BBC noticed him in 1997 after he appeared unscripted in a documentary about the restaurant at Christmas.

The BBC Two series The Naked Chef began in 1999, and the accompanying cookbook became a bestseller in Britain. That year he also cooked lunch for Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. After three series, he moved to Channel 4 in 2002, once the BBC decided against renewing his contract following his appearance in cooking-themed advertisements for the supermarket Sainsbury's. His first Channel 4 series, Jamie's Kitchen, followed the opening of the London restaurant Fifteen. Later programs included Jamie's School Dinners, Jamie at Home, Jamie's 30-Minute Meals and Jamie's Meat-Free Meals. He also provided the voice of the health inspector in the British version of the Disney Pixar film Ratatouille. He also competed against Mario Batali on Iron Chef America in 2008.

Oliver has published more than 30 books. His first children's book, Billy and the Giant Adventure, appeared in 2023. Its sequel, released in March 2024, was criticized by an Indigenous Australian education advocacy group over its portrayal of Indigenous Australians, and in November he recalled the book and apologized for causing offense.

His restaurant business opened Jamie's Italian in Oxford in June 2008. At its largest the chain had 42 restaurants in Britain, along with franchised branches abroad. He also founded the barbecue restaurant Barbecoa in London in 2011 with the American chef Adam Perry Lang. The Jamie Oliver Restaurant Group went into administration on 21 May 2019, by which point 22 of its 25 British restaurants had closed and about 1,000 jobs had been lost. An employment tribunal found in 2020 that the company had broken labor law by failing to consult employees before redundancies. Oliver opened a new London restaurant, Jamie Oliver Catherine Street, in November 2023, in partnership with LW Theatres, and a Jamie's Italian in Belgrade in March 2024. In March 2026 he reopened Jamie's Italian in London with the backing of investors from the chain Prezzo.

He was the public face of Sainsbury's from June 2000 until the partnership ended in 2011 after eleven years, and later worked with Woolworths in Australia, the meal-kit company HelloFresh and Tesco.

Recognition

The Naked Chef won the BAFTA Television Award for best feature in 2001. Oliver was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire in the 2003 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to the hospitality industry. His TED Talk earned him the 2010 TED Prize, and Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution won an Emmy at the 62nd Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards on 21 August 2010. The Royal College of General Practitioners made him an honorary fellow in 2013 in recognition of his work on school meals. In 2019 he was named a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italy, with the investiture held at the Italian embassy in 2021.

Public roles

Oliver started the Fifteen restaurant in London to train young people from disadvantaged backgrounds for the hospitality trade, and the Fifteen Foundation later opened restaurants in Amsterdam, Cornwall and Melbourne. In 2005 he began a campaign to improve school food, first called Feed Me Better, and the British government pledged to act on the issue. A Channel 4 News poll named him the most inspiring political figure of 2005. He later took the same message to the United States in Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, set first in Huntington, West Virginia, and then in Los Angeles. In April 2022 he co-organized a London charity dinner with the Ukrainian chef Yurii Kovryzhenko to raise money for people affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

His views and campaigns have also drawn criticism, including from the writer Jack Monroe, who argued that his comments on cheap cooking misjudged the circumstances of people on low incomes.

Personal life

Oliver married Juliette Norton, known as Jools, in July 2000. They have five children. In 2019 the family moved to Spains Hall, a sixteenth-century house in Finchingfield, Essex.