Has the domestic goddess got a twisted streak underneath that immaculate exterior? Film director Tim Burton appears to think so, having revealed that he based the White Queen in his new adaptation of Alice in Wonderland on the celebrity cook Nigella Lawson.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times's entertainment blog, Burton said he was inspired by Lawson, a "very beautiful cooking show host in England". But it was her submerged eerie edge that excited him. "She's really beautiful and she does all this cooking, but then there's this glint in her eye and when you see it you go, Oh, whoa, she's like really … nuts. I mean in a good way. Well, maybe. I don't know."

That duality is applied in the film by Anne Hathaway, who plays the White Queen with what the LA Times calls an unsettling pearly grin, part Glinda the Good Witch and part Stepford wife.

Burton said that what really sets Alice apart from so much children's literature "is the fact that everybody is a little bit off. The White Queen is no exception." And nor, by extension, is Lawson.