For fifteen years on Food Network, Anne Burrell, with her spiky platinum hair and booming voice, took on the hopeless: people who set fire to toast and boiled pasta in cold water. On Worst Cooks in America, which she began hosting in 2010, she turned them into cooks. Burrell died at her home in Brooklyn, New York, on June 17, 2025. She was 55. The New York City medical examiner later ruled that her death was a suicide.
Burrell was born in Cazenovia, in upstate New York, in 1969. She studied at the Culinary Institute of America and spent time cooking in Italy, where she developed her love of Italian food. She worked in New York restaurant kitchens and taught at the Institute of Culinary Education.
Food Network
Her television career began in 2005 as sous chef to Mario Batali on Iron Chef America, where she cooked alongside him in the show’s Kitchen Stadium. In 2008 she got her own programme, the Emmy-nominated Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, which ran until 2012. Worst Cooks in America, in which she and another celebrity chef each train a team of disastrous home cooks, became her best-known show and ran for more than twenty seasons. She also appeared on Chopped, Beat Bobby Flay and, in 2025, House of Knives. Burrell married Stuart Claxton in 2021. She was survived by her husband, his son Javier, her mother, her sister and her brother. Food Network called her a remarkable person and culinary talent, and fellow hosts paid tribute to her wit and laughter.
Burrell’s best-known show was built on the idea that anyone could learn to cook. If you are struggling, in the US you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline; in the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be reached on 116 123.