Though she’s been gone for 17 years, the hometown French chef, Julia Child, proves more popular than ever. She was the topic of the movie “Julie & Julia,” which starred Meryl Streep as the strapping chef. She’s the subject of a recent documentary titled “Julia” and was the heroine in a best-selling book about her. She plays the ghostly mentor on a new cooking competition for the Food Network. And now HBO Max is serving up “Julia,” a drama about her extraordinary life on March 31.
Back in 1963 when Child first appeared on the fuzzy black-and-white cathode tube, who would’ve guessed that America would fall in love with French cuisine and the tall tomboy who taught it.
Though she studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Child was no culinary snob. Her TV show caught her wrestling a 30-pound turkey into its pan like a WWE champ, stringing an unruly web of sugar threads all over her kitchen, and spouting iconoclastic ideas like baking the stuffing OUTSIDE the turkey.
Starring as the gastronomic guru in the new series is British actress Sarah Lancashire, who’s best known here as the tough and troubled cop in England’s “Happy Valley.”
Lancashire had never heard of Julia Child until the movie was released in 2009. “She did not have a presence in the U.K., and so the marketing around the film was the first time that I became aware of her,” says Lancashire, 57.
The actress doesn’t feel she needs to compete with the varietal versions of Child that have come before. “It’s a completely different project, and the nature of the project is different. The tone of the project is different. You do 50 different Hamlets, you do 50 different actors, they’ll all be different,” she says.”
Lancashire did study briefly with a dialect trainer to catch the breathy cadence of Child’s speech.
“I worked with a vocal coach for a very short period of time ... we were looking at accent, really. And then for me, I pulled away from that and started looking at trying to create a parallel voice that would essentially create the essence of her vocal eccentricity and her singularity but was harmonized with the physical,” she explains.
“And that’s important to find a place which is comfortable. And that’s just a matter of time, really, of playing around and trying to find something which works,” she adds.
“I’m not a mimic. I can’t impersonate. And also, she did have this extraordinarily complex vocal change, which I don’t share with her. And, therefore, that unfortunately wasn’t an ‘in’ for me. I had to find something which worked in parallel and was comfortable.”
Lancashire leaned heavily on all the cumulative data about the eccentric Child. “There’s such an awful lot of source material available online, so that was a starting point to reference her, plus reading the books about her and the letters between her and Avis (DeVoto, who was Child’s friend and unofficial agent).
“But at some point, for me, I actually put the written material away,” says Lancashire. “It didn’t necessarily make sense with what we were trying to do, which was a drama as opposed to a documentary. ... But really, I spent many, many hours just watching her. There’s so much source material available and really that’s what I was doing. But that’s not a hardship. She’s a joy to watch. You kind of want to be in her company and, yeah, she makes you feel better about the world, really. She’s a tonic.”
David Hyde Pierce portrays Child’s husband and No. 1 champion. “I think she’s one of a kind,” he says of Child, “and I think that’s why people have stayed interested in her throughout changing fashions and styles and foods and everything else, and why so many different versions of her have occurred, because she’s one of a kind and eternally fascinating.”
Daniel Goldfarb, creator and executive producer of the eight-episode series, says, “There’s something kind of unsinkable about her. She never took 'no' for an answer. She just always persevered, and she persevered with joy. She lived her life really with joy in every stage of her life. And she sort of bloomed as she got older and older and more and more comfortable in her shoes and as herself.
“And I think there's something when you watch her, whether she was cooking or whatever she was doing, you sort of saw the joy and the kind of love for life that she had. And I think that it had staying power,” Goldfarb adds.
Branagh brings 'Death' to TV
Kenneth Branagh’s “Death on the Nile” pulls into port on Hulu and HBO Max on March 29. Based on Agatha Christie’s classic mystery, “Death on the Nile” has been reworked several times. It once served as a five-part radio series. In 1978 Peter Ustinov became the canny Belgian sleuth, Hercule Poirot, in the feature film version.
In 2004 the tale became the third episode of series nine of “Agatha Christie’s Poirot,” which starred David Suchet as the prissy Poirot. Now Branagh not only directs, he dons the mustache and spats of the meticulous Poirot for this travel mystery, which arrives on DVD and Blu-ray April 5.
Branagh constantly challenges himself with difficult projects like this. He says he hopes to find a purpose in what he does. Without that, it’s pointless, he says. “If it’s not making a difference, making some kind of contribution or contains something that has some kind of value,” he says.
“Sometimes you have to shake yourself down to understand how a piece of entertainment can be quite meaningful to people, or at the very least, enjoyable and diverting. And this is not a bad thing to be able to do.”
He says at one time he lost that sense of direction. “In a way that sounds like it’s ego-led about legacy, but it’s more about finding a purpose. I’ve also continued to feel somehow creating, being involved in creativity is part of who I am, what I'm meant to do.”
Jazz artist invades opera
Jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard has seized his horn and taken to the high road with his second opera, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” part of “Great Performances at the Met” airing on PBS April 1.
Blanchard was just a kid when he first took up the trumpet. “There was a local musician in New Orleans named Alvin Alcorn who came to my elementary school," he says. "I had been taking piano lessons at that time. I had been taking piano lessons since I was five years old. I was in the fourth grade, and he came to my elementary school, and they put us in assembly, and he brought this jazz band with him.
“As soon as I heard him play, the only thing I could hear was the vibrato on the trumpet, and I kept thinking, ‘The piano can't do that. Piano can't do that.’ I remember going home and told my father that day I wanted to play the trumpet.
“And that was right after my father got me a piano. So it was really interesting. And I can't tell you what my father said at that moment in time. He forgot I was an elementary school kid and talked to me like a grown man.”
A fan of Puccini, the Grammy winning Blanchard explains how he composes: “You have to understand what it takes to build an idea, what it takes to take the counter lines and have things make sense,” he says.
“So it is a combination of a lot of things. It's one of the reasons why I stress to all of my students: ‘Study composition, develop your craft. Everybody can come up with an idea and a lot of people have talent, but it is the craft that really takes it to the next level.’ ”
He first became interested in opera because of his dad. “My father loved the opera. While I was a kid, he would play opera in the house all the time. He was an amateur baritone. He was a singer. They tried to get me to sing; they heard me sing and realized that wasn't going to work. I heard a lot of opera growing up in the house. ... I heard all those operas and the melodic lines, and the structure of those operas really stuck with me — the dramatic nature of ‘Turandot’ or ‘Carmen’ or any of those things, really played a big role in how I see telling these stories in its form.”
William Hurt was an original
It was so sad to hear of William Hurt’s passing last week at 71. Always an original, Hurt was best known for movies like “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (for which he earned the Oscar), “Body Heat,” “The Big Chill” and his daring performance as a scientist experimenting on himself in “Altered States.”
His forays into television were equally memorable, in roles on “Goliath,” “Broadcast News,” “Damages” and “Too Big to Fail (which earned his second Emmy nomination.)
Always loquacious and introspective, the last time we talked he told me, “Many times I’ve thought someone is looking out for me to the extent that I’m not a creator, but I’m created. Therefore, the creator is within me. I know if it were not for incalculable risks against it, I would not be here; I would be gone. I experience life as an incredible privilege to experience consciousness, the opportunity to be aware of consciousness, the opportunity to appreciate the relationship between sensibility and consciousness. I’m almost always quietly awestruck about it.”
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