Julia Child is having a moment, again. The cook, who brought French cuisine to the American masses, is the subject of a new feature-length documentary, plus a competitive cookery show called The Julia Child Challenge, in which archive footage of Child will serve as a Wizard of Oz-like instructor from a giant screen. And now, there’s Julia (Sky Atlantic), a dramatisation of Child’s move from cookbook author to television pioneer. Though Meryl Streep’s turn as Child, in the 2009 film, Julie and Julia, may have helped to spread her global fame this century, she remains more of an American institution than a British one, though I do hope there is still room in the food biopic canon for The Mary Berry Story.
Julia is charming and warm, with all the appeal of comfort food, as unrefined as that can be. Sarah Lancashire is fabulous as Child, managing to neither replicate Streep nor do a surface impression of the real woman. It begins in 1961, just after Mastering the Art of French Cooking has been published and is about to be a huge success, and by the time the story kicks off in earnest, Child is famous enough for people – women, mostly, though also men speaking on behalf of their wives – to stop her as she goes about her business, to tell her that she has transformed their eating habits.
