Julie Powell, Author Behind ‘Julie & Julia,’ Dead at 49

Julie Powell, the author whose blog inspired the 2009 Nora Ephron film Julie & Julia, has died. She was 49.

Powell, whose Julie/Julia Project food blog led to a book before it was brought to the big screen, died Oct. 26 at her home in Olivebridge, New York, The New York Times reports. Her cause of death was cardiac arrest, according to her husband, Eric Powell.

The blog that made Powell famous began when she was working as an administrative assistant and was looking “to lend structure to her days” by embarking on a cooking challenge in which she would attempt to make every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1, per The Times.

As Powell cooked her way through Child’s 524 dishes, she chronicled the experience for Salon.com readers from her small Long Island City apartment kitchen. Powell set a year-long deadline for herself, and just as the year was closing in, then-Times reporter and Food52 founder Amanda Hesser wrote about Powell, spiking interest in her blog and challenge.

Powell’s blog was published in book format in 2005 and titled Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. The book was turned into a film four years later, in which Amy Adams plays Powell and while Meryl Streep stars as Julia Child; the film also features Stanley Tucci and Chris Messina.

The movie, which was Ephron’s final film before her 2012 death, tells the parallel stories of Powell and Child and their experiences in cooking and love. Looking back on the film’s 10th anniversary in 2019, Decider’s Jade Budowski wrote that Julie & Julia “acts as an enduring symbol of Ephron’s evolution both as a storyteller and as a human, a beautiful showcase for what contentment can look like, the contentment that she seemed to be full of before her life was tragically cut short.”

Budowski added, “If more films were cooked up with as much love as this one seems to be, all the doom and gloom in the world would be a lot easier to digest.”

After the success of her first book, Powell published a second in 2009 titled Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession, and continued writing in more recent years.

She is survived by her parents, her husband and her brother.