Who is Julia Child? A First Post cheat-sheet

You have to hand it to Meryl Streep. She turned 60 in June and still she comes up with bold new cinema performances as regular as clockwork: in the space of three years she's played a glossy mag harridan in The Devil Wears Prada, a Catholic school principal in Doubt, the bride's mother in Mamma Mia! and now the grande dame of American cookery, Julia Child, in Nora Ephron's latest film, Julie & Julia, released this week in Britain.

Of the four, this will be the trickiest for British audiences. Child was the world's first celebrity chef and the woman who taught Americans there was more to French cuisine than French fries, but her name is little known in Britain. Here's a First Post cheat-sheet...
 
Child was by no means America's first TV cook, but she was the most high-profile. She was also distinctive, standing at 6ft 2in as she explained how to make duck à l'orange and boeuf bourguignon in her swooping, warbly voice. Her unpatronising manner and enthusiastic presenting style ensured she attracted a broad following.
 
Born in 1912 in Pasadena and university-educated, she had started off working as an advertising copywriter in 1930s New York and California before spending the war years working for US intelligence. She married comparatively late, in 1946 when she was 34, and was introduced to French cuisine when her diplomat husband Paul was posted to Paris. Finding herself at a loose end, she taught herself to cook and attended Paris's famous Cordon Bleu cookery school.
 
Her legendary recipe book Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which she wrote in collaboration with two French chefs she met in Paris, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholl, was published in 1961. The 734-page cookbook went on to become a bestseller and led to magazine columns and an Emmy award-winning TV show, The French Chef, which began in 1963 and ran for 10 years.
 
Over the next four decades Child presented numerous TV series, such as Julia Child & Company and Dinner At Julia's, and wrote several more books, including 1989's The Way to Cook, which she considered her magnum opus. She was still presenting TV shows well into her 80s, filming four series in the 1990s. After she died in 2004, aged 91, the kitchen in which she presented her shows, at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was recreated in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
 
Ephron's script blends Child's story - based on her autobiography My Life in France - with another real-life tale, that of New York blogger Julie Powell. Powell, who is played by Amy Adams in Julie & Julia, documented her year-long attempt to cook each of the 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cookery in 2002.
 
Happily for Powell, 36, she gained a book deal from her blog and the resulting memoir Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously came to Ephron's attention.

Since then, Powell has written another book, Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, which recounts how she had an extra-marital affair and then, in an effort to regain control of her life, became an apprentice butcher. The book has had its publication delayed until December 2009 to avoid upsetting fans of the rather more upbeat Julie & Julia.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:Angie Errigo, Empire: Streep is to die for, so funny, so touching, so brilliant - from her uncanny mimicry of Child's fluting, whooping voice to the subtle but heart-piercing way she suggests Julia's pain at being childless. The most pleasant surprise is Nora Ephron's direction, free of her cutesier signature touches and the running battles of the sexes. Not that there aren't girlie bits. (Verdict: four stars out of five)
 
Katha Politt, the Guardian: What I loved most of all, though, was that Julie & Julia is that very rare thing, a movie centred on adult women, and that even rarer thing, a movie about women's struggle to express their gifts through work. Not a boyfriend, a fabulous wedding, a baby, a gay best friend, a better marriage, escape from a serial killer, the perfect work-family balance, another baby. Real life is full of women for whom work is at the centre, who crave creative challenge, who are miserable until they find a way to make a mark on the world.

A O Scott, the New York Times: The unevenness of Julie & Julia is nobody's fault, really. It arises from an inherent flaw in the film's premise. Julie is an insecure, enterprising young woman who found a gimmick and scored a book contract. Julia is a figure of such imposing cultural stature that her pots and pans are displayed at the Smithsonian. The fact that Ms Ephron, like Julie herself, is well aware of this gap does not prevent the film from falling into it. ·