Julia Child inspires a tv series. After the movie, The French Chef’s matrix arrives on the small screen

Julia Child. From cinema to tv

The film Julie & Julia (2009) told the world the story of Julia Child, using the generational comparison between the young Julie Powell (a failed writer with cooking passion) and the brilliant American cook and popularizer, who taught America to cook French in the early 1960s. Played on the big screen by Meryl Streep, the epic story of Julia Child - who died in 2004 after a long and successful television career, punctuated by the publication of several cookbooks - thus conquered the general public, thanks to a film that quickly became a blockbuster, which earned Streep an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Comedy, in 2010. More than ten years later, the stories of the funny and empathetic Child are about to return to the screen, this time in a TV miniseries format.

Julia Child’s life

Produced by Lionsgate and 3 Arts for the U. S. streaming platform HBO Max, the series will be titled simply Julia, and will aim to tell the true story of the Child, focusing on the recording period of The French Chef (based on the recipe book Mastering the Art of French cooking), which in 1963 gave her notoriety and continued to grow. For ten years, until 1973, it became one of the first and most appreciated cooking shows in the history of American television. In the United States, the original episodes of the successful show are now available for streaming thanks to a project launched in 2020. The interest in the figure of Julia Child, charismatic as she was, seems not to be exhausted. Created by Daniel Goldfarb and directed by Charles McDougall, the TV series will be divided into eight episodes; the protagonist will be Sarah Lancashire, flanked by David Hyde Pierce in the role that on the big screen was Stanley Tucci (as Julia’s dear husband, Paul Child). Isabella Rossellini is also present in the cast, but there are still few details about the respective performances.

Series objectives

The series, HBO anticipates, will focus on Child’s family history, and the story of her happy marriage, which brought her to live in Paris immediately after the Second World War and was the precursor of the author’s gastronomic successes; but everything will help to make clear how Julia Child was able to transform the way of communicating food, in the America of the economic boom. So the series will also be an opportunity to reconstruct the events of American television in its early days and the management of the celebrity by a woman who became from one day to the next symbol of the battles for women’s emancipation that were agitated in the background. The truthfulness of the script is guaranteed by the presence in the production team of Todd Schulkin, as a contact person for the Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts, which preserves the writer’s memory and preserves her archive. Slapped by the pandemic, filming of the series will resume and end in Boston next spring (but the pilot episode has already been approved by HBO).