Nora Ephron
(1941 - 2012)
Nora Ephron was a distinguished
Jewish American director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, journalist,
and blogger.
Born on May 19, 1941 to screenwriters Pheobe (nee Wolkind)
and Henry Ephron in Manhattan, Nora was the eldest of four daughters.
When she was four years-old, her family moved to Beverly Hills, California,
where she lived until the fall of 1958 when she began studying at Wellesley
College in Massachusetts.
At Wellesley, Ephron majored in political science,
wrote for the weekly Wellesley News, and interned at the Kennedy White
House during the summer of 1961. She moved to New
York City upon graduation in the spring of 1962 to become a journalist.
Ephron worked for Newsweek for a year where she was a fact
checker and mail girl, and wrote for the New York Post for
five years afterwards. She covered stories like the Beatles, the Star
of India robbery at the American Museum of Natural History, and a pair
of seals at the Coney Island aquarium that would not mate.
In the late 1960s, Ephron began writing more for magazines,
including Esquire and New York, and quickly made a
name for herself through her personal, honest writing style and critical
profiles of luminaries such as Ayn Rand and Betty Friedan.
In 1976 Ephron married American Jewish journalist Carl
Bernstein –best known for exposing the Richard Nixon administration’s
complicity in the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s – and went
into the movie business soon after. Her first screenplay, “Silkwood,”
was a 1983 film based on the life of Karen Silkwood, who died under
suspicious circumstances while investigating abuses at the plutonium
plant where she had worked. Meryl Streep and Kurt Russell starred in
the Mike Nichols-directed film.
Ephron’s greatest cinematic success was When
Harry Met Sally… (1989), a romantic comedy directed by Rob
Reiner starring Billy
Crystal and Meg Ryan, a saga of two people in love who try to have
a purely platonic relationship. Ryan’s table-pounding fake-orgasm
scene with Crystal in Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side is probably the most well-known,
followed by the unforgettable “I’ll have what she’s
having” comment by a middle-aged woman sitting nearby. Other box
office hits that Ephron wrote, directed and or produced include Sleepless
in Seattle (1993), You’ve Got Mail (1998), and Julie
& Julia (2009).
Ephron was an outspoken feminist who, at her 1996 commencement
speech, told that year’s graduating Wellesley class:
Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel,
I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some
way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I
also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf
of women.
The recipient of innumerable accolades throughout her
multiple careers, Ephron received three nominations for the Academy
Award for Writing Original Screenplay for Silkwood, When
Harry Met Sally…, and Sleepless in Seattle. She
received the prestigious Wellesley Alumnae Achievement Award in 2006
for her accomplishments in film, journalism, and literature. Ephron’s
novel “Heartburn” (1986) and essay collections “I
Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman” (2006)
and “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections” were instant
best-sellers.
Ephron died of pneumonia, a complication from leukemia,
on June 26, 2012 at the age of 71. She is survived by two ex-husbands
(Dan Greenburg and Carl
Bernstein), her husband, crime journalist and screenwriter Nicholas
Pileggi, and two children.
Sources: Associated Press. “Writer-Filmmaker Nora Ephron dies at 71,”
AP,
June 26, 2012.
Ephron, Nora. “Nora Ephron Remarks to Wellesley College Class
of 1996,” Wellesley
College, July 19, 1999.
McGrath, Charles. “Writer and Filmmaker With a Genius for Humor,”
New York Times, June 26, 2012.
Mendelsohn, Janet. “Wellesley College News Release,” Wellesley
College Public Affairs, March 10, 1999.
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