Julie Powell, Blogger Known for ‘Julie & Julia,’ Dies at 49
Amy Adams portrayed the author alongside Meryl Streep in the 2009 film about her quest to cook every recipe in ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ in a year.
Powell died Wednesday of cardiac arrest at her home in Olivebridge, New York, her husband, Eric Powell, said.
Streep was nominated for an Oscar for best actress her turn as Child in Columbia’s Julie & Julia, which was Ephron’s final movie (she died in June 2012).
Powell entertainingly wrote about her amateurish efforts in her blog, The Julie/Julia Project, which went on to attract hundreds of thousands of page views. The experience became the best-selling 2005 book Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen and then a 2009 paperback, Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously.
Ephron merged two memoirs, 2006’s My Life in France, which Child wrote with her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme, and My Year of Cooking Dangerously, for her screenplay.
Powell “was happy for the story to be Nora Ephron’s story,” her husband told the Times. “It did kind of sand down the quirky and the spiky and a lot of the things everyone knew her for and loved her for. And she was OK with that.”
Born Julie Foster on April 20, 1973, in Austin, Powell graduated from Amherst College in 1995 with a bachelor’s degree in theater and fiction writing. She and Eric first met in high school when they starred in a production of All My Sons, and they wed in 1998.
Her second and last book, Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, was published in 2009.