Julia Carolyn McWilliams Child (1912-2004)
Chef, Author, Television Personality
Recipient, Peabody Award, 1965
Recipient, Emmy Award (1966); Daytime Emmys (1996, 2001)
Recipient, The French Legion of Honor, 2000
Fellow, The American Academy of Arts & Letters, 2000
Recipient, The Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2003
Recipients, honorary doctorates from Harvard, Smith College, Johnson & Wales University, Brown University, and others
Host, The French Chef (1963-73) and 13 subsequent programs
Born to a well-to-do California family, Julia McWilliams graduated from Smith College in 1934 and spent the rest of the decade as an advertising copywriter in New York and a freelancer around her home in Pasadena. In 1941- too tall, at 6’2”, for the WACs or other active service branches, she joined the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA. She rose rapidly and, while on assignment in Sri Lanka met the charming and much shorter Paul Child.
They married in 1946; Paul joined the US diplomatic service. In 1948 he was assigned to Paris, and Julia enrolled in a cooking school. There she met her co-authors for Mastering The Art of French Cooking- Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck- who invited her to join the project to help them make the book attractive to the US market.
After nearly spending the 1950s on the book, the trio saw their manuscript rejected by their publisher Houghton Mifflin, for being too encyclopedic. Knopf took a different view, and the 726 page work became a commercial hit and critical success for decades to come.
After writing a column in The Boston Globe, Child appeared on a local public TV station for a demonstration of how to cook an omelet. She was offered a show, and The French Chef began its ten year run on WGBH in early 1963. Over the next three decades she produced thirteen more series, almost always with a related book, and became one of the best-known television personalities in America.
Paul Child died in 1994; in 2001 she retired to California, and died there in 2004, a few days before her 92nd birthday.
Her infectious sense of humor stood her in good stead on her television shows, and as an object of parody in the media. She did a video on the origins of life as a recipe for the Smithsonian’s Air & Space Museum in 1976, and thought Dan Ackroyd’s 1978 Saturday Night Live portrayal of her hilarious. Her kitchen and cookware is preserved as a Smithsonian exhibit, and her memory is perpetuated by the Julia Child Rose- just the color of butter!
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