Julia Child may have been revered as the woman who taught America to cook. But Meryl Streep, who now portrays the pioneering chef in Julie and Julia, has decidedly mixed feelings about her. On the one hand, she is full of admiration for Child’s indefatigable enthusiasm, determination and love of life. But in her own dealings with Child, who died in 2004 aged 92, she found her to be stubborn and dismissive and was disappointed to discover she was a pawn of big business. Child was the first American woman to study at Paris’s famous Cordon Bleu cooking school, and the popularity of her book, Mastering the Art Of French Cooking, led to a TV show and a cooking career that made her a household name. She steered eaters away from the canned, frozen and processed and promoted foods that were fresh and flavourful. She did not, however, always practice what she preached. Twenty years ago, when Meryl Streep was working with a group called Mothers and Others, which she formed to try to get organic agriculture into supermarkets, she contacted Child to enlist her support.

“She was very resistant and she brushed us off quite brusquely,” the Oscar-winning actress recalled. “She sent word back that she didn’t have anything to say on the subject, and she really resisted making a connection between the high fat diet of a heavily laden cordon bleu-influenced cuisine and cholesterol levels. I remember being so disappointed that she was in the thrall of something called the American Council for Science and Health, which was a front organisation for agro-businesses and petrochemical businesses. “They seduced Julia into giving them money, so she was on the other side for a while. Eventually I think she came around, though.” Meryl Streep is the first to admit she is far from being a wonderful cook. But she knows her way around a kitchen a lot better since portraying Child. Roasting the perfect chicken, browning meat properly – even cleaning garlic and onion from the fingers – are all things she says she learned while filming Julie and Julia, the light-hearted story of Child and writer-blogger Julie Powell, played by Amy Adams. “There was a whole kitchen set up at the studio and I practiced my cooking there,” says Streep. “I could justify it because it was part of my job. I’ve been cooking roast chicken for 30 years but I’d been doing it wrong, and Julia Child has a recipe that is absolutely foolproof. It’s the difference between doing it pretty well and doing it great.

“But to cook well takes practice and to be honest I feel much more confident about my acting skills than my cooking skills. I like very simple things. A perfect roast chicken with a salad and a glass of Sancerre is my idea of heaven.” For Julie and Julia, writer-director Nora Ephron adapted and interweaved two memoirs, Child’s My Life In France and Powell’s Julie and Julia, about her attempt to cook her way through Child’s seminal 1961 cookbook, Mastering The Art Of French Cooking – 524 recipes in 365 days – and chronicle her efforts in a blog. The film alternates between Child and her husband’s life in France and, 50 years later, Powell’s life in a New York apartment with her husband. It portrays the two couples’ passion for their spouses and for food while depicting the lives of two ladies who found fame and fulfillment in their respective eras by cooking and writing about it. Ephron cast Streep, an old friend, after running into her at a Shakespeare In The Park performance in New York. Streep asked what she was working on, Ephron told her and Streep immediately went into her Child impression: “Bon Appetit!” Ephron sent her the script and, Streep recalled: “It was absolutely beautiful. Julia’s approach to her day was one of energy and appetite and a blanket determination not to let troubles get you down. It’s a great quality and she really had it.

“When you talk about passion, Julia Child just didn’t have it for her husband or cooking; she had a passion for living. What was compelling about her was her joie de vivre and her unwillingness to be bogged down in negativity. She loved being alive and that’s inspirational in itself. “I saw her cooking shows when I was a kid. She was a pioneer because she was one of the first women on television who wasn’t an entertainer and she was already 50 years old, with her personality indelibly created by her own life experience. There was no focus group telling her how to dress and look, and her generous nature was what drew people to her.” Streep was talking in a Beverly Hills hotel on a promotional trip to Los Angeles from the East Coast where she and her family divide their time between Manhattan and Connecticut. She wore a black-belted, red Prada dress and, professional that she is, was happy to talk of both her own life and Child’s. On the surface the two women have little in common, as Child was an awkward and clumsy 6ft 2in while Streep is an elegant 5ft 6in, but the actress feels a link with the indefatigable cook through her mother. “My mother only had one cook book and it was called the I Hate to Cook Book and she used to say, ‘If it’s not done in twenty minutes, it’s not dinner,’” she says. “I remember when I was ten years old, going to a neighbour’s house and she and her mother were sitting at the kitchen table with what looked like tennis balls, and I asked what they were doing, and she told me they were making mashed potatoes, and I said, ‘What do you mean? Mashed potatoes come in a box!’ Because in my house, they did. That was the world Julia Child broke into. She transformed cooking for regular people.

“But even if my mother wasn’t a good cook, she had a similar joie de vivre and an undeniable sense of how to enjoy her life, so this is my homage to her spirit.” Although she channels Child’s delightfully dotty mannerisms and odd, high-pitched voice, Streep insists she was not impersonating the chef. “I’m playing Julia as Julie’s idea of what she was like, so I’m not really ‘doing’ Julia Child,” she says. “While I felt a responsibility to her memory and the legacy of the work she did, I didn’t feel I was replicating her because I don’t presume to know what she was like. That’s my rationalisation, my ‘out’, because I thought that even if I made a big, glaring mistake with her I’m really only a figment of someone else’s imagination.” At 60, Meryl Streep is one of the leading actresses of her generation, with a record 13 Oscar nominations and two wins, for Kramer vs. Kramer and Sophie’s Choice, and she is still working as hard as she ever did. Because she went straight from Mamma Mia! to Doubt to Julie and Julia and has just finished an as-yet untitled romantic comedy with Steve Martin, she has had little time for cooking at home. When she does, however, she has the appreciative support of her husband of 30 years, sculptor Don Gummer. “He’s amazing because he just likes everything I make,” she said. “Even when it doesn’t turn out he’s so appreciative, and there’s nothing better than when you are a little disappointed in what you’ve tried he doesn’t notice that it didn’t turn out so good. “But I don’t make excuses. That’s another thing Julia taught me: Don’t apologise, because it always make it taste worse. If they didn’t notice it was bad, shut up.” Then, breaking into a Julia Child laugh: “Bon appetit!”