Julia Child

Julia Child was an American chef, cookbook author, and television personality whose pioneering 1961 book Mastering the Art of French Cooking and subsequent decades-long television career introduced French cuisine to American home cooks and transformed American food culture. She was born Julia Carolyn McWilliams on August 15, 1912, in Pasadena, California. She was unusually tall (6'2") and unusually privileged — she attended Smith College and then worked as a research assistant for the OSS (predecessor to the CIA) during World War II.

She met her husband Paul Cushing Child during her OSS service in Sri Lanka and China, and they were married in 1946. When Paul was posted to Paris in 1948 with the US State Department, Julia enrolled at the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. She studied with master chef Max Bugnard and over the next decade developed and rigorously tested the recipes that would become Mastering the Art of French Cooking, co-written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle. The 1961 book — 726 pages, with detailed step-by-step recipes adapted for American kitchens — became one of the most-influential cookbooks in American history.

Her television career began with the 1963 PBS series The French Chef, which ran for ten seasons through 1973 and became one of the most-watched cooking shows in American TV history. Child's on-camera persona — tall, warbling-voiced, cheerfully fumbling, deliberately unintimidating — became a permanent fixture of American cooking television. She continued hosting cooking shows through her seventies and eighties, including Julia Child & Company (1978–1979), Cooking with Master Chefs (1993–1994), and Baking with Julia (1996–1998).

She authored 17 cookbooks across her career and was awarded the French Légion d'honneur in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003. She died on August 13, 2004, at her assisted-living facility in Montecito, California, two days before her 92nd birthday. Meryl Streep's 2009 portrayal of Child in Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia brought her to a new generation. Her Cambridge, Massachusetts kitchen has been preserved at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Her name Julia is from the Latin Iulia, the feminine form of the Roman family name Iulius (Julius). Julia has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for over a century.