Giada De Laurentiis had no intention of entering into the family business of show. By now, it's hard to imagine the Italian-born granddaughter of famed film producer Dino De Laurentiis as anything other than the Food Network fixture we've known her to be for the last 15 years, presiding over her ever-expanding empire from one authentic (or, some might argue, over-) pronunciation of prosciutto to the next, but when execs at the cable channel came a'calling, the Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, who turns 49 on Thursday, August 22, had no desire to take them up on their offer.

"Because I come from a movie family," she admitted on Eater's Upsell podcast in April 2018. "I was like, 'What is Food Network?' First of all, Food Network wasn't what it is today. There were like three people on it, Emeril [Lagasse] being one, Bobby Flay maybe being the other...And so I was like, 'No, this has gotta be a prank, I'm not doing this, this is ridiculous, I'm not doing this.'"