(ABC News) Nora Ephron, the writer and director of American film classics such as “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle,” died today at the age of 71.
Nora Ephron at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., July 27, 2009. (Munawar Hosain/Fotos International/Getty Images)
Ephron died in a New York City hospital after a long battle with leukemia and taxing chemotherapy treatment, friends of hers told ABC News.
The three-time Academy Award nominee was a prolific author, screenwriter, playwright and director who made a name for herself as a pioneer in Hollywood, where she was one of the first women to write and direct her own films. She contributed essays and journalism to outlets including the New York Times and the Huffington Post, for which she last wrote a story in June 2011.
She had most recently written the play “Lucky Guy,” a drama based on the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mike McAlary, which was expected to open on Broadway in 2013 with Tom Hanks in the starring role.
Ephron’s marked film career was known for her charming romantic-comedies that often starred such silver screen icons as Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, and Meg Ryan, with whom she worked multiple times throughout her career. Streep starred in Ephron’s first hit film, 1983′s “Silkwood,” which was directed by Mike Nichols and earned Ephron her first Academy Award for screenwriting.
The pair worked together again on Ephron’s memorist film “Heatburn” in 1986, which she based on her tumultuous relationship with her second husband, the journalist Carl Bernstein. Bernstein, who helped crack the Watergate story open at the Washington Post in the early 1970s, reportedly cheated on Ephron during their marriage, which ended in divorce. The couple had two sons before they split, Jacob, now a journalist, and Max, a musician.
Ephron then went on to get two more Oscar nominations for the hit films “Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless in Seattle” in the 1990s.
A native New Yorker, Ephron was raised by screenwriters in Beverly Hills before attending Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She interned for President John F. Kennedy in the White House after college, but soon decided to pursue journalism rather than politics, she wrote in her 2006 book, “I Feel Bad About My Neck.”
“I realized to my sadness that I was probably the only person in the entire Kennedy White House that JFK had not made a pass at. I like to think it was because I had a really bad permanent wave. But I don’t know,” she wrote. “After I was an intern for JFK, it was very clear to me that Washington was probably not a great place for women.”
Ephron eventually returned to live in New York City when she married author and filmmaker Nicholas Pileggio, her third husband, in 1989, with whom she lived until her death.
The last 30 years of American cinema saw frequent hits written or directed by Ephron, including “Michael,” “You’ve Got Mail,” and, most recently, “Julie and Julia,” but she was also a bestselling author and, late in life, a playwright.
Ephron’s 2006 collection of essays about aging, “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” was a New York Times bestseller, and was followed up by her 2010 collection, “I Remember Nothing.” She co-authored a hit Off Broadway play, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” with her sister Delia.
News Source:
ABC News – http://abcnews.go.com/US/writer-director-nora-ephron-dead-71/story?id=16656032#.T-pWBvUU-So
