Julia Child

Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California, in 1912 and reached the stove by an unlikely route: she studied history at Smith, worked in advertising, and served with the OSS in Ceylon and China during the Second World War. A posting to Paris with her husband Paul led to a lunch of sole meunière in Rouen that she later described as the moment cooking became her life.

In Paris she enrolled at the Cordon Bleu and fell in with two Frenchwomen, Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she opened a cooking school and began a manuscript that became Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). The book succeeded because it explained technique rather than assuming it, and because Child tested every instruction until an American supermarket kitchen could reproduce it.

The French Chef, which began airing in 1963, made her a national figure; its unscripted accidents and her willingness to laugh at them did as much for the cause as the recipes. She went on to write The Way to Cook and Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home, and until her death in 2004 she remained the country's most trusted teacher of French cooking.

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