New Film Explores the Life of Julia Child, a Woman Who Changed Television

After Julie Cohen and Betsy West finished their Academy Award-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary RBG about the iconic Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2018, they started looking for their next subject. After considering scores of candidates, they hit on a somewhat unlikely person — Julia Child, who captivated Americans with her wildly popular PBS show, The French Chef, which first aired in 1963 when Child was 50, and the book she labored 12 years to write, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Telling a story about a woman who changed TV and the way the country thinks about food appealed to the filmmakers.

“What put Julia over the top as a subject was how deceptively groundbreaking and culturally important she was,” Cohen said on a video call. “She had such a profound effect on the culture.”

West, who grew up in rural Maine with only a few TV channels, remembers seeing The French Chef, but the filmmakers didn’t know much about Child beyond her being on TV and the impersonation Dan Ackroyd did of her in the 1970s on Saturday Night Live (which Child loved and would show her guests at dinner parties).

West said she assumed Child had grown up loving to cook (that wasn’t the case), and her becoming a superstar late in life made a great story.

“I did not know that Julia did not discover her passion for food until she was almost 40 years old,” West said. “I did not know the long road to becoming a good cook and that to write her cookbook took 12 years and that she was well into middle age when she went on television.”

Child was born in 1912 to a wealthy, conservative family in Pasadena. She went to Smith College, but said fun interested her more than academics. After she graduated, wanting adventure and to serve her country during World War II, she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. The film, Julia, which opened in theaters earlier this month, tells of how she met Paul Child, a cartographer, when they were stationed in Sri Lanka (called Ceylon at the time). Paul Child was assigned to the U.S. Information Agency in Paris in 1948, and Julia loved everything about the city, especially the food. She enrolled in the prestigious cooking school Le Cordon Bleu, one of few women. Child and her friend Simone Beck decided to write a cookbook geared to an American audience, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The book has sold more than 2.5 million copies since it was published in 1961.

After moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, Child appeared on a TV show in Boston to talk about the book and made an omelet on air, a decided departure for public television. West calls this one of her favorite moments in Child’s story — how she got herself in front of the audience of a sedate reading show when broadcast options were so limited.

“It was her initiative to demand the hot plate and to insist on cooking an omelet for the host,” she said. “Then it was the audience’s reaction that led to Julia going on television. It wasn’t a bunch of TV executives who said, ‘Let’s do this.’ It was the audience responding.”

At over 6 feet tall, Child had no interest in making herself small and demure.

“When Julia burst onto the airwaves, there was really nothing like this eccentric, quirky, loud, tall, knowledgeable person,” West said. “Julia had the self-confidence to be teaching people something and teaching them in such an entertaining way.”

Child’s integrity and authenticity made her unique, and the movie shows how she refused to do product endorsements, even taping over brand names on things as innocuous as salt on her show. Her naturalness also endeared her to viewers, as when she dropped a potato pancake onto the stove and said, “Oh, that didn’t go very well,” and reminded her viewers they were alone in the kitchen, so no one would see when they made such mistakes.

The French Chef was one of the first cooking programs on TV. The show, where Child would demonstrate how to cook popular French recipes such as tarte tatin, beef bourguignon, and French onion soup, was so popular that it quickly syndicated to 20 other educational stations across the country at a time when all educational programming was local. It ran for 10 years.

In their research, the filmmakers discovered that Child came out strongly in favor of Planned Parenthood. Rather than the organization approaching her, it was the other way around, with Child, a financial contributor, asking in 1982 what she could do. (She wrote a pledge letter and gave cooking classes to raise money.)

“It’s pretty amazing she did that, especially when it was not like she was a Hollywood star who surrounded herself with only liberal people,” Cohen said. “Her fan base was middle America, and some of them, as we showed in the film, weren’t just dismissive, they were boycotting her because they didn’t like that she stood for it, and that just did not impact her degree of support because she actually was a person who had a huge amount of integrity, and we love that about her.”

The filmmakers used archival research and spoke with Child’s family, friends, and co-workers as well as people in the food world like José Andrés, Ina Garten, Ruth Reichl, and Marcus Samuelsson about how Child shifted how Americans saw food and cooking.

Cohen said she thinks it’s hard for younger people to imagine what the food landscape looked like when Child started doing her show, when the appetite for convenience might mean pouring cream of mushroom soup over meat for dinner and eating Jell-O with marshmallows for dessert.

Child’s approach to cooking and eating were a sharp departure from viewing making food as a chore. To demonstrate recipes geared for women who didn’t like to cook and were looking for expediency, West held up a copy of Peg Bracken’s 1960 best-selling I Hate to Cook Book, showing the multiple recipes on a page, because they’re so short (“Brown the garlic, onion, and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika, and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink,” one reads).

Along with Child’s professional journey, Juliashows the tremendous bond between the chef and her husband, and how Paul Child encouraged his wife’s career and appreciated her accomplishments. Paul Child took early retirement from the State Department when his loyalty to the United States was questioned during the Joseph McCarthy era, but rather than becoming bitter about her rising stardom, he loved people admiring his remarkable wife and threw himself into supporting her show, from wiping her brow to writing cue cards to scrubbing pots.

Cohen says that, as with the documentary about Ginsburg, they knew the relationship would be part of the film, but its significance grew when they started doing interviews and editing and they realized what a huge role Paul Child played.

“We love telling feminist love stories,” Cohen said. “That was one of the things that appealed to us about this project.”

When she was in her 70s, Child felt PBS was trying to push her out, and she went to Good Morning America, where she found a much bigger audience.

Cohen admires her indefatigability and optimism and says Child made cooking look like so much fun that people wanted to join her.

“I think her exuberance and joie de vivre is the coolest thing about Julia,” Cohen said. “She did 201 episodes of The French Chef. You would think toward the end, she would have been getting a little sick of it, yet she seems like she’s having an incredible time.”