Julie Powell, the writer whose book inspired the 2009 comedy-drama Julie & Julia, recently passed away on Oct. 26 at age 49. Her husband, Eric Powell, confirmed to the New York Times on Tuesday that the cause of death was cardiac arrest.
Powell gained nationwide attention when she was employed at a low-level administrative job in Lower Manhattan in 2002. An aspiring writer, she began The Julie/Julia Project, a blog that documented her attempt to spend a year cooking every recipe in her mother’s copy of Julia Child’s 1961 cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1.
However, without a natural flair for cooking in a small apartment kitchen, it was Powell’s self depreciating struggles as a novice chef that made people fall in love with her blog.
The blog was so massively popular that it was turned into a 2005 best-selling book called Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, which went on to inspire the film, starring Meryl Streep as Child and Amy Adams as Powell. Though the book lent Child a new following in her final years, she was not a fan of Powell’s writing and later died in 2004, five years before the movie came out.
“I don’t understand how she could have problems with them,” Child told former Los Angeles Times food editor Russ Parsons, when he sent her some excerpts of the blog. “She just must not be much of a cook.” The author’s umbrage apparently stemmed from the fact that she had extensively tested and retested the recipes to ensure they would be accessible to cooks of all skill levels.
Julie & Julia was written and directed by Nora Ephron, and was likewise the last film before her death in 2012.
Published: Nov 1, 2022 03:07 pm