Los Angeles ? Julia Child, whose chirping words of encouragement and unpretentious style brought French cuisine to American homes through her television series and books, died Friday. She was 91.

A 6-foot-2 American folk hero, “The French Chef” was known to her public as Julia. She showed a delight not only in preparing good food but in sharing it, and ended her landmark public television lessons at a set table with the wish, “Bon appetit.”

Child died at her home in an assisted-living center in Montecito, about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles, said her niece, Philadelphia Cousins.

“She passed away in her sleep,” Cousins said. “She was with family and friends and her kitten, Minou. She had cookbooks and many paintings by her husband, Paul, around the house.”

Child, who died two days before her 92nd birthday, had been suffering from kidney failure, Cousins said.

“America has lost a true national treasure,” Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity for Child’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, said in a statement. “She will be missed terribly.”

Child was a skillful — and sometimes messy — chef, beckoning everyone to have no fear and give exquisite cuisine a try.

“Dining with one’s friends and beloved family is certainly one of life’s primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal,” she said in the introduction to her seventh book, “The Way to Cook.” “In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal.”

‘No snobbism about food’

Her gourmet philosophy also included drinking. In one TV program, chef and friend Jacques Pepin asked what kind of wine she preferred with picnics — red or white.

“I like beer,” Child said enthusiastically, pulling out a cold bottle and two glasses.

Television cooking personality Julia Child prepares a French delicacy in her cooking studio on Nov. 24, 1970. Child, whose warbling, encouraging voice and able hands brought the intricacies of French cuisine to American home cooks through her television series and books, died in her sleep three days before what would have been her 92 birthday. She died Thursday Aug. 12, 2004, at her home in Santa Barbara, Calif.

Pepin recalled a friendship that began in 1960.

“We’d go to the market, and she’d buy Wonder Bread,” he told The Associated Press. “She had no snobbism about food whatsoever. She loved iceberg lettuce.”

Like the rest of us, she sometimes dropped things or had trouble getting a cake out of its mold.

“She just kind of opened the doors … to the idea that cooking could be a pleasure and it wasn’t drudgery in the kitchen,” said Alice Waters, executive chef and owner of Chez Panisse, the celebrated Berkeley, Calif., restaurant. “It wasn’t just for fancy French chefs.”

In an A-line skirt and blouse, and an apron with a dish towel tucked into the waist, Child grew familiar enough to be parodied by Dan Aykroyd on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” and was the subject of Jean Stapleton’s musical revue, “Bon Appetit.” She also was on the cover of Time magazine in 1966.

Decades of popularity prompted President Bush last year to give her a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Her custom-designed kitchen has been on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

“She was more than a pioneer, a legend or a giant. She’s the rock that started the avalanche that changed the way America eats,” said Brooke Johnson, president of Food Network.

From spy to chef

Born in Pasadena, Calif., Child once said she was raised on so-so cooking by hired cooks.

She graduated from Smith College in 1934 with a history degree and aspirations to be a novelist or a writer for The New Yorker magazine. Instead, she ended up in the publicity department of a New York City furniture and rug chain.

When World War II began, she joined the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA. She was sent off to do clerical chores in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where she met Paul Child, a career diplomat who later became a photographer and painter.

They married in 1946 and two years later were sent to Paris.

Child enrolled in the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school, motivated at least in part by a desire to cook for her epicure husband.

“I’d been looking for my life’s work all along,” she once told the AP. “And when I got into cooking I found it. I was inspired by the tremendous seriousness with which they took it.”

In France, she also met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, with whom she collaborated on “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The book was nine years in the making and became mandatory for anyone who took cooking seriously.

She was 51 when she made her television debut as “The French Chef.” The series began in 1963 and continued for 206 episodes. Child won a Peabody award in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966, and went on to star in several more series for Boston’s WGBH-TV.

Recent work

Since the 1980s, she devoted attention to promoting the serious study of food and cooking. She co-founded the American Institute of Wine and Food in San Francisco in 1981 and co-founded the James Beard Foundation in New York City in 1986.

More recently, she teamed with Pepin for the 1994 PBS special, “Julia Child & Jacques Pepin: Cooking in Concert” and a 1996 sequel, “More Cooking in Concert.”

Paul Child died in 1994, and in late 2001, Julia Child, a longtime resident of Cambridge, Mass., moved to Santa Barbara. The couple had no children.

A private memorial service was planned, but Child asked that no funeral be held.