From Wikipedia.
Nora Ephron passed away after a long illness on June 26, 2012.
Read all about her from Wikipedia.
Nora Ephron (May 19, 1941 – June 26, 2012) was an American filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, author and blogger.
She is best known for her romantic comedies and was a triple nominee for the Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay for three films: Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless In Seattle.
She sometimes wrote with her sister Delia Ephron.
Her last film was Julie & Julia.
She also co-authored the Drama Desk Award-winning theatrical production, Love, Loss, And What I Wore.
Of Israeli descent and born in New York City, she was the eldest of four siblings.
Her family left Manhattan for Beverly Hills in California when she was four.
Ephron's sisters Delia and Amy are also screenwriters.
Her sister Hallie Ephron is a journalist, book reviewer, and novelist who writes crime fiction.
Ephron's parents based Sandra Dee's character in the play and the Jimmy Stewart film Take Her, She's Mine on their 22-year-old daughter Nora and her letters to them from college.
Ephron graduated from Beverly Hills High School in 1958. It was during her junior year there that she became interested in journalism.
Ephron graduated from Wellesley College in 1962 and worked briefly as an intern in the White House of President John F. Kennedy.
When New York City's newspapers suspended publication during a strike by the International Typographical Union, Ephron and some of her friends, including the young Calvin Trillin, put out their own satirical newspaper.
Ephron's parodies of New York Post columnists caught the eye of the Post's publisher, Dorothy Schiff.
When the strike was over, Schiff hired Ephron as a reporter.
The 1960s were a lively time for journalism in New York and Dorothy Schiff's Post, at that time a liberal-leaning afternoon tabloid, offered Ephron a free hand to explore her favourite city from top to bottom.
In 1966, she broke the news in the Post that Bob Dylan had married Sara Lownds in a private ceremony three months earlier.
While working at the Post, Ephron also began writing occasional essays for publications such as New York magazine, Esquire and The New York Times Magazine.
Her work as a reporter won acclaim as part of the "New Journalism" movement of the 1960s, in which the author's personal voice became part of the story.
Her humorous 1972 essay, "A Few Words About Breasts," made her name as an essayist.
As a regular columnist for Esquire, and she became one of America's best-known humorists.
Her essays, often focusing on sex, food and New York City, were collected in a series of best-selling volumes, Wallflower At The Orgy, Crazy Salad, and Scribble Scribble.
In this position, Ephron made a name for herself by taking on subjects as wide-ranging as Dorothy Schiff, her former boss and owner of the Post; Betty Friedan; and her alma mater Wellesley, which she said had turned out a generation of "docile" women."
A 1968 send-up of Women's Wear Daily in Cosmopolitan resulted in threats of a lawsuit from WWD.
While married to Carl Bernstein in the mid-1970s, at her husband and Bob Woodward's request she helped Bernstein re-write William Goldman's script for All The President's Men, because the two journalists were not happy with it.
The Ephron-Bernstein script was not used in the end, but was seen by someone who offered Ephron her first screenwriting job, for a television movie.
Ephron enjoyed her greatest writing success with When Harry Met Sally (1989), a romantic comedy directed by Rob Reiner, starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.
The resulting film was an enormous success, and Ephron was now established as Hollywood's foremost creator of romantic comedies.
In You've Got Mail (1998), Ephron re-united Sleepless stars Hanks and Ryan in a contemporary variation on the classic comedy, The Shop Around The Corner.
She made an unexpected foray into writing for the stage with her 2002 play Imaginary Friends, based on the turbulent rivalry of authors Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy.
She co-authored the play Love, Loss, And What I Wore (based on the book by Ilene Beckerman) with her sister, Delia.
She took another unusual tack with an offbeat big-screen adaptation of the 1960s television series Bewitched, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell.
Ephron wrote a regular blog for the online news site The Huffington Post. Her 2010 collection of essays, I Remember Nothing, takes a humorous look at the aging process and other topics.
She was married three times.
Her first marriage, to writer Dan Greenburg, ended in divorce after nine years.
Her second was to journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame in 1976.
They had two sons.
Ephron was married for more than 20 years to her third husband, screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, with whom she lived in New York City.
