Julia Child looks talks with friends at the Housewares Show in 2001, in Chicago, Ill. Child died yesterday at her assisted living center home in Montecito Calif., according to a relative and a publicist. She was 91. (AP Photo//Stephen J. Carrera)

Julia Child, "The French Chef" whose TV shows taught millions to cook, died yesterday at her home in an assisted-living center in Montecito, Calif., a coastal town about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles. She would have been 92 tomorrow.

Child wrote or co-authored at least 15 cookbooks, including "The Way To Cook," a 544-page book with more than 800 recipes and 600 color photographs, in 1989. She won the first Emmy awarded to a public television personality in 1966, earned a Peabody Award "for distinguished achievement in television" in 1965 and even has been decorated by the French government.

Warm and charming in person, Child was a frequent visitor to Berkshire County, although she never lived here.

Her mother was the former Carolyn Weston of Dalton, whose father in 1863 founded the Byron Weston Paper Co., which was bought by Crane & Co. in 1956. Julia's uncles, Philip and Donald Weston, lived in Pittsfield.

Her brother, the late John McWilliams III, moved to Pittsfield in 1940 and then to Williamstown. He died in 2002.

When the late Amy Bess Miller was president of Hancock Shaker Village in the 1970s, she twice invited Child to give cooking classes at the museum.

Child had been suffering from kidney failure. "America has lost a true national treasure," said Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity for the famed chef's publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. "She will be missed terribly."

A memorial service for family members was planned, but Child asked that no funeral be held.

The 6-foot-2 American folk hero was known to her public as Julia and preached a delight not only in good food but in sharing it, ending her landmark public television lessons at a set table and with the wish, "Bon appetit."

She wasn't always tidy in the kitchen and sometimes dropped things or had trouble getting a cake out of its mold. Who cannot remember her chicken falling on the floor, her unbridled samplings of dishes, her awkward kitchen maneuvers? Dishes such as boeuf bourguigno ne or omelette aux fines herbes came alive for viewers under the spell of Child's mix of respect and irreverence.

Child did not take a cooking lesson until she was in her 30s. And she was in her 50s when her first television series began in 1963.