Paula Deen biography
Date of birth : 1947-01-19
Date of death : -
Birthplace : Savannah, Georgia
Nationality : American
Category : Famous Figures
Last modified : 2011-01-18
Credited as : Cook and author, restaurateur and actress, owns The Lady & Sons
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Deen resides in Savannah, Georgia, where she owns and operates The Lady & Sons restaurant with her sons, Jamie and Bobby Deen. She has also published five cookbooks. Though married in 2004 to Michael Anthony Groover, she continues to use the surname Deen from her first marriage professionally.
Paula hosts the cable TV cooking shows Paula's Home Cooking and Paula's Party. Hers is a rags-to-riches kind of story -- right out of high school she married and had two kids. After her husband left her, she started a business in Savannah that sold sack-lunches to office workers. That led to a restaurant in early 1990, and by the end of the decade her home-style southern cooking had gained national attention. With an assist from Food Network's Gordon Elliot, she landed her own show on the cable network in 2003, followed by a more relaxed (and flirtatious) addition, Paula's Party in 2006. She's the anti-chef of the Food Network, a self-taught cook and advocate of the butter-n-bacon approach, with an empire that includes her Savannah restaurant (The Lady & Sons), a magazine (Cooking With Paula Deen), several cookbooks and a memoir (It Ain't All About the Cookin').
Her sons, Jamie and Bobby Deen, run the family's Savannah restaurant and have their own line of cookbooks, as well as a Food Network show, Road Tasted... Before she got into the food business, Deen suffered from anxiety attacks that kept her housebound for years... Her younger brother runs Uncle Bubba's Oyster House in Savannah, Georgia... Deen appeared in the feature film Elizabethtown (2005, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst).
Films:
2002–present Paula's Home Cooking (television)
2005 Elizabethtown
2006–2008 Paula's Party (television)
2006 Chefography (television)
2008–present Paula's Best Dishes (television)
2009 Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List (television)
2009 Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (television)
