During the 2020 lockdown, while half the country was failing to make sourdough, Florence Pugh started filming herself cooking on Instagram, and the videos turned out to be one of the small joys of that year. One of them was barely a recipe at all: Marmite on buttered toast, made with real care and a running commentary. For an Oscar-nominated actress at the top of her profession to spend screen time singing the praises of a Marmite scrape is exactly the sort of thing that earns a place on this list.
Does Florence Pugh like Marmite?
She does, and she is particular about it. In her cooking videos Pugh treated Marmite toast as a proper ritual rather than a sad lockdown lunch. Her one strong opinion is about the butter: she likes it slightly cold, so that it only half melts into the hot toast and you still get little cool, salty pockets of it under the Marmite. It is the kind of detail you only share if you genuinely eat the stuff.
Florence Pugh’s Marmite toast
The method is simple and, if you are a Marmite person, hard to argue with. Hot toast, a thick layer of butter that is still fractionally cold from the fridge, then a thin scrape of Marmite over the top so it melts slightly into the butter. No cheese, no fuss. The point is the contrast between warm toast, cool butter and sharp Marmite. It became enough of a talking point that food writers went away and tried to recreate it, with mixed personal results, which is about as Marmite an outcome as you could ask for.
Who is Florence Pugh?
Florence Pugh was born on 3 January 1996 in Oxford. Her mother is a dancer and her father a restaurateur, so food and performance were both in the house early. As a small child she had a respiratory condition, tracheomalacia, which led the family to spend time in Spain for her health. She went to school in Oxford and started acting young, with her brother Toby Sebastian also becoming an actor.
Florence Pugh’s breakthrough: Lady Macbeth
Pugh first turned serious heads in 2016 with “Lady Macbeth”, a cold and controlled period drama in which she played a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage who refuses to stay trapped. The performance won her a British Independent Film Award and marked her out as someone to watch, several years before the wider public caught up.
Florence Pugh’s biggest films
The catch-up came fast. In 2019 she appeared in “Fighting with My Family”, the folk-horror “Midsommar” and Greta Gerwig’s “Little Women”, the last of which brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress as Amy March. She has since moved comfortably between blockbusters and serious drama, including “Black Widow”, “Oppenheimer” and “Dune: Part Two”, while keeping a reputation for being outspoken and refreshingly normal about fame.
Florence Pugh’s notable films at a glance
- Lady Macbeth (2016)
- Fighting with My Family (2019)
- Midsommar (2019)
- Little Women (2019), Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress
- Black Widow (2021)
- Oppenheimer (2023)
- Dune: Part Two (2024)
For all the range in that list, it is the Marmite toast video that a certain kind of fan remembers most fondly. High praise, on this site at least.
