American chef, writer and television host Julia Child was BOTD in 1912. Born in Pasadena, California to a wealthy conservative family, she graduated from Smith College, where her 6 feet 2 inch height became an asset on the college basketball team. After graduation, she worked as a advertising copywriter in New York City, before joining the Office of Strategic Services in 1942. Posted to Ceylon and China, she fell unexpectedly in love with her colleague Paul Child, and they married in 1946. After the war, they moved to Paris, where Julia’s life was changed by a meal of oysters and sole meunière. After studying at the Cordon Bleu, she became a cookery teacher with fellow gourmands Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, and spent ten years writing a French cookbook for “servantless Americans”. Published in 1961, the two-volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking became an international bestseller, revolutionising American food culture and making the 49 year-old Child an unlikely celebrity. After demonstrating how to cook an omelette during a TV interview, Child was invited to host a cooking show on Boston public television. Her show The French Chef, partially funded by Child, premiered in 1962. Audiences quickly warmed to Child’s cheerful larger-than-life personality and trombone-like voice, and the show became a hit, running for over a decade and followed by network TV series. Child continued working into the 1990s, retiring in 1994 after Paul’s death. Her eccentricity, voice and height made her a natural subject for parody, inspiring imitators, most notably Dan Ackroyd in a now-famous Saturday Night Live sketch, and the hapless Swedish Chef in The Muppet Show. Like many people of her class and generation, Child had a complicated relationship with homosexuality. She disapproved of “homovipers” in the cooking world, but was close friends with gay chef James Beard. In the 1980s, she supported AIDS research and funding after the death of another gay friend, but was sued in 1992 for blocking the appointment of a gay man to her culinary institute. Nonetheless, she attracted a devoted gay following, and has inspired numerous drag acts. Child died in 2004 aged 91. Her memoir My Life in France, co-written with her grand-nephew Alex Prud’homme, was published in 2006. She was played by Meryl Streep in the 2009 film Julie and Julia, based on food blogger Julie Powell’s 2005 book about her year-long project to cook all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The 2022 TV drama series Julia, starring Sarah Lancashire, focused on the birth of Child’s TV career, re-imagining her as a gay rights ally who attended drag shows with Beard.