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Nora Ephron

American Journalist and Writer
Date of Birth : 19 May, 1941
Date of Death : 26 Jun, 2012
Place of Birth : New York, New York, United States
Profession : Journalist, Writer
Nationality : American
Nora Ephron was an American journalist, writer, and filmmaker. She is best known for writing and directing romantic comedy films and received numerous accolades including a British Academy Film Award as well as nominations for three Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Tony Award and three Writers Guild of America Awards.

Biography

Ephron was the eldest daughter of Hollywood screenwriters Henry and Phoebe Ephron, who based two of their Broadway plays, Three’s a Family and Take Her, She’s Mine, on their family life with young Nora. After graduating from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1962, she returned to New York City, where she made her living as a reporter with the New York Post and wrote humorous essays for publications such as Esquire. Her essays were collected into popular books—including Wallflower at the Orgy (1970), Crazy Salad (1975), and Scribble, Scribble (1978)—and she began branching out into script writing.

After authoring several television episodes, Ephron made the jump to feature films, cowriting, with Alice Arlen, the screenplay for Silkwood (1983), based on the true story of Karen Silkwood (portrayed in the movie by Meryl Streep), a union activist who died while investigating safety violations at a nuclear fuel production plant. Silkwood won Ephron her first Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay. She then turned to her own life for movie fodder, transforming her 1983 novelization of the breakup of her marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein into her first solo screenplay, Heartburn (1986). The comedy-drama starred Streep in the Ephron role and Jack Nicholson as her philandering husband.

Ephron earned her second and third Academy Award nominations for best original screenplay for the wildly popular romantic comedy classics When Harry Met Sally… (1989) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). She also directed the latter film, which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. After several critical and commercial failures, Ephron returned to Sleepless in Seattle’s winning formula in the late 1990s, once again pairing Hanks and Ryan in the romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail (1998), which updates the anonymous epistolary romance of the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner for the age of online communication. Meanwhile, her first script for the stage—Imaginary Friends, about the longtime enmity between writers Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy—was produced on Broadway in 2002.

I Feel Bad About My Neck, Ephron’s first essay collection in nearly 30 years, reached the top of The New York Times’s best-seller list for nonfiction in 2006, and it was followed by I Remember Nothing (2010). In 2009 she reunited with Streep for the box-office hit Julie & Julia. Ephron adapted the screenplay and directed the film, a dual biography of renowned chef Julia Child and writer Julie Powell, who blogged about cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s famous cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). Ephron continued her playwriting career with Love, Loss, and What I Wore (2009), which she and her sister Delia adapted from Ilene Beckerman’s 1995 book. Lucky Guy, which centres on the gritty life of New York Daily News columnist Mike McAlary, premiered on Broadway a year after Ephron’s death. That play, along with many of her newspaper columns, blog posts, speeches, and other works, was published in the collection The Most of Nora Ephron (2013).

Quotes

Total 40 Quotes
I don't think any day is worth living without thinking about what you're going to eat next at all times.
So, twice a week, I go to a beauty salon and have my hair blown dry. It’s cheaper by far than psychoanalysis, and much more uplifting.
Here are some questions I am constantly noodling over: Do you splurge or do you hoard? Do you live every day as if it's your last, or do you save your money on the chance you'll live twenty more years? Is life too short, or is it going to be too long? Do you work as hard as you can, or do you slow down to smell the roses? And where do carbohydrates fit into all this? Are we really all going to spend our last years avoiding bread, especially now that bread in American is so unbelievable delicious? And what about chocolate?
That's another thing about being a certain age that I've noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror.
Some people pretend to like capers, but the truth is that any dish that tastes good with capers in it tastes even better with capers not in it.
I think if you're lucky enough to find a voice in whatever you do, that voice will come sneaking out no matter what.
I look as young as a person can look given how old I am.
The Wonderbra is not a step forward for women. Nothing that hurts that much is a step forward for women.
You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it.
You can't meet someone until you become what you're becoming.