Writer, director Ephron dies at 71 of leukemia
Films included ‘Sleepless in Seattle’
Nora Ephron, the humorist, novelist, foodie and writer/director of films including “Sleepless in Seattle,” “You’ve Got Mail” and “Julie & Julia,” died Tuesday night in New York. She was 71. The cause was complications from acute myeloid leukemia.
A second-generation filmmaker (her parents were “Desk Set” scribes Henry and Phoebe Ephron), Ephron was a throwback to wisecrackers such as Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker, wits who wrapped social observations in humor.
Ephron movies identified trends as they were happening, like the concept of the “chick flick” (see “Sleepless in Seattle”) and that of “high-maintenance woman” (see her script for “When Harry Met Sally …”). She was a highly sensitive cultural barometer who could, with great accuracy, measure the subtlest changes in the atmosphere.
Born in New York, raised in Beverly Hills, and educated at Wellesley, Ephron enjoyed one of the most publicly chronicled lives in American arts and letters. Her birth and infancy inspired her parents to write the screenplay “Three is a Family,” made into a 1944 film. Her letters from college inspired her parents’ play “Take Her, She’s Mine,” subsequently made into a 1967 film. And her 1983 novel “Heartburn,” a thinly disguised version of her marriage and divorce from Washington Post scribe Carl Bernstein, wrung simultaneous laughter and tears. She adapted her novel to the screen for the 1986 film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.
After college and a stint as a White House intern during the Kennedy administration, Ephron moved to New York, where she briefly sorted envelopes in the Newsweek mailroom. During the 1962-’63 newspaper strike, her contributions to a satirical broadside spoofing New York Post columnists caught the eye of Post publisher Dorothy Schiff, who hired Ephron. There she profiled celebrities such as Doris Day, wrote early lifestyle pieces, and broke the news that Bob Dylan had married Sarah Lownds. In 1967, she wed novelist Dan Greenburg. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1976.
When she married Bernstein that same year, she relocated to Washington and almost immediately became pregnant with Jacob, the first of their two sons. While pregnant with their second, Max, she learned that her husband was having an affair. In “Heartburn,” she would satirize him as a man “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”
Apart from her sons, the most important thing she got out of the marriage was learning how to write a screenplay. She and Bernstein tried their hand at rewriting William Goldman’s screenplay of “All the President’s Men,” the book written by Bernstein and Bob Woodward. She later said that “retyping Goldman” was the best education in story and dialogue structure a screenwriter could ever have. She and Alice Arlen collaborated on the screenplay for “Silkwood” (1983), the biopic about whistle-blower Karen Silkwood, which won her the first of three Oscar nominations. The others were for “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally … .” She and Bernstein divorced in 1980.
She moved back to New York, continued writing essays (collected in such books as “Crazy Salad”; “Scribble, Scribble”; “Wallflower at the Orgy”; “I Feel Bad About My Neck” and “I Remember Nothing”). In 1987, she wed crime writer Nicholas Pileggi (“Wise Guys”) and commenced an original screenplay called “When Harry Met Sally …” (1989), a romantic comedy that asked the question, “Can friends be lovers?” and answered in the affirmative.
Ephron made her directorial debut in 1992 with “This is My Life,” her adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s novel “This is Your Life.” Wolitzer eulogized her Tuesday: “She was the best, an inspiration to so many people and a great, great friend.”
She is survived by her husband, her sons, and her three sisters and frequent collaborators, Delia, Amy and Hallie Ephron.