Nora Ephron, 1941–2012

Nora Ephron took to heart an adage of her screenwriter mother: “Everything is copy.” In a career that ranged from newspaper journalist to playwright, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and film director, Ephron mined her own life to capture the wry essence of life as a smart, plugged-in modern woman. She spun humorous insight from her attitude about her breasts, the infidelity of her second husband, and the way Julia Child cut onions. Her message wasn’t humor per se as much as the self-knowledge humor fosters. “Be the heroine of your own story,” she counseled, “not the victim.”

Ephron was the eldest of four daughters—all of whom became writers—born to Hollywood scriptwriters Henry Ephron and Phoebe Wolkind, said TheDailyBeast.com. She graduated from Beverly Hills High School and Wellesley College, then set off immediately for New York City, which she later wrote she’d imagined as “a place where I’d be surrounded by people I was dying to be with. And I turned out to be right.”

After stints at Newsweek and the New York Post, Ephron started writing personal essays and profiles “marked by an impeccable sense of when to deploy the punch line,” said The New York Times. Her screenwriting career began when she helped her then husband, journalist Carl Bernstein, doctor the script for All the President’s Men. Ephron honed that talent in her first Oscar-nominated screenplay, Silkwood, and applied it to a deliciously vengeful end in her film adaptation of her best-selling book Heartburn, a barely novelized account of Bernstein’s marriage-ending affair. She revealed a gift for romantic comedy in her script for When Harry Met Sally…, which won her a second Oscar nomination. She won a third for Sleepless in Seattle, which she also directed. Her last movie was Julie and Julia.

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“What Ephron had going for her, fully formed and evermore, was a voice—deadpan, personal, digressive, intelligent, acidic, confiding—and that voice electrified everything she would ever write or film,” said The New Yorker. Her close friend Meryl Streep called her “an expert in all the departments of living well.”