Nora Eprhon is the stylish and sharp-witted New York author who directed the hit romantic comedies
Sleepless in Seattle and
You've Got Mail. Nora Ephron grew up in Los Angeles. Her parents were the screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron, who wrote the
James Cagney film
What Price Glory? (1952) and the
Fred Astaire vehicle
Daddy Long Legs (1955). Nora Ephron graduated from Wellesley College in 1962, and after a brief stint as an intern for the
John F. Kennedy administration, she turned to journalism. She wrote for the
New York Post, did magazine pieces and doing celebrity interviews, and wrote an
Esquire column on women's issues. Her 1970 collection
Wallflower at the Orgy was an early success. In 1976 she married Carl Bernstein, famous as half of the Watergate muckraking duo of
Woodward and Bernstein. Ephron and Bernstein did a rewrite of the script for the Watergate film
All The President's Men. The script wasn't used, but Ephron got the screenwriting bug. Her first major feature script, for the 1983 drama
Silkwood, won her an Oscar nomination. She then wrote the 1986 film
Heartburn, based on her own book of the same title, about her bitter divorce from Bernstein. Always stylish and often dressed in black, Nora Ephron became a popular figure in both movie and literary circles in the 1980s, and her script for the 1989 romantic comedy
When Harry Met Sally was widely praised and won her a second Oscar nomination. With
This Is My Life (1992) she moved into the director's chair. She directed eight films in all, including the popular romance
Sleepless in Seattle (1993, with
Tom Hanks and
Meg Ryan) and the just-as-popular romance
You've Got Mail (1998, also with Hanks and Ryan). Ephron's last film,
Julie and Julia (2010), starred
Meryl Streep as chef
Julia Child. Meanwhile she continued to write essays; her 2006 collection
I Feel Bad About My Neck was a best-seller. Her other books included
Scribble Scribble (1979) and
Crazy Salad (2000).
