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 have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women's movement didn't realise how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying, 'Don't you see how oppressed you are.
Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.
And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.
I look out the window and I see the lights and the skyline and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love, and the world's greatest chocolate chip cookie, and my heart does a little dance.
Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don't take it off until you're thirty-four.
I have a theory that children remember two things-when you weren't there and when they threw up.
Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.
Everyone always asks, was he mad at you for writing the book? and I have to say, Yes, yes, he was. He still is. It is one of the most fascinating things to me about the whole episode: he cheated on me, and then got to behave as if he was the one who had been wronged because I wrote about it! I mean, it's not as if I wasn't a writer. It's not as if I hadn't often written about myself. I'd even written about him. What did he think was going to happen? That I would take a vow of silence for the first time in my life? "
And so, Thanksgiving. Its the most amazing holiday. Just think about it — it's a miracle that once a year so many millions of Americans sit down to exactly the same meal as one another, exactly the same meal they grew up eating, and exactly the same meal they ate a year earlier. The turkey. The sweet potatoes. The stuffing. The pumpkin pie. Is there anything else we all can agree so vehemently about? I don't think so.
Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape.
