Nora Ephron
Ephron with her husband Nicholas Pileggi in New York City, 2010.
Born	(1941-05-19) May 19, 1941 (age 71) New York City, U.S.
Ethnicity	Jewish
Occupation	Actress, screenwriter, producer, director, journalist, playwright
Years active	1973–present
Spouse	Dan Greenburg (1967–1976) Carl Bernstein (1976–1980) Nicholas Pileggi (1987–present)

Nora Ephron (born May 19, 1941) is an American female filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright, journalist, author, and blogger.

She is best known for her romantic comedies and is 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 writes with her sister Delia Ephron. Her most recent film is Julie & Julia. She has also co-authored the Drama Desk Award-winning theatrical production, Love, Loss, and What I Wore.

Personal life[link]

Ephron was born in New York City, eldest of four daughters in a Jewish family, and at age four moved to and grew up in Beverly Hills;^[1] her parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, were both East Coast-born and raised screenwriters. Her 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.^[2] Both became alcoholics during their declining years.^[1] Ephron graduated from Beverly Hills High School in Beverly Hills, California, in 1958. It was during her junior year there, that she became interested in Journalism.^[3] She then majored in political science and wrote for the weekly newspaper at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1962.^[3]

She has been married three times. Her first marriage, to writer Dan Greenburg, ended in divorce after nine years.^[1] Her second was to journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame in 1976. Ephron had an infant son, Jacob, and was pregnant with her second son, Max, in 1979 when she found out the news of Bernstein's affair with their mutual friend,^[4] married British politician Margaret Jay. Ephron was inspired by the events to write the 1983 novel Heartburn,^[5] which was made into a 1986 film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. In the book, Ephron wrote of a husband named Mark, who was “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.”^[1] She also said that the character Thelma (based on Margaret Jay) looked like a giraffe with "big feet."^[1] Bernstein threatened to sue over the book and film, but he never did.^[2]

Ephron has been married for more than 20 years to screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi and lives in New York City.

Although Jewish by birth, Ephron is not religious. "You can never have too much butter – that is my belief. If I have a religion, that's it," she quipped in an NPR interview about her 2009 movie, Julie & Julia.^[6]

Career[link]

Ephron graduated from Wellesley College in 1962^[7] and worked briefly as an intern in the White House of President John F. Kennedy. After she graduated from Wellesley, she moved to New York and became a mail girl at Newsweek. She only held that position for a year.

When New York City's newspapers suspended publication during a strike by the International Typographical Union, Nora 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, a liberal-leaning afternoon tabloid, offered Ephron a free hand to explore her favorite city from top to bottom.^[8] In 1966, she broke the news in the Post that Bob Dylan had married Sara Lownds in a private ceremony three-and-a-half months before.^[9] While working at the Post, Nora Ephron also began writing occasional essays for publications such as New York, 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.^[8] 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, whom she chastised for pursuing a feud with Gloria Steinem; and her alma mater Wellesley, which she said had turned out a generation of "docile" women."^[2] A 1968 send-up of Women's Wear Daily in Cosmopolitan resulted in threats of a lawsuit from WWD.^[2]

While married to 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.^[2]

Nora Ephron enjoyed her greatest success yet with When Harry Met Sally (1989), a romantic comedy directed by Rob Reiner, starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. The film struck an instant chord with audiences and became an international hit. Ephron had seen her parents' writing careers falter in their 1950s, as they both fell prey to alcohol and the fickle fashions of Hollywood. Ephron contemplated a transition to directing, in part to protect her own writing career in an industry still largely inhospitable to films by or about women. Unfortunately, her directing debut, This Is My Life, about the struggles of a single mother working as a stand-up comic, was a box office disappointment. Ephron knew her future as a director would stand or fall with her next assignment.^[8]

Sleepless in Seattle (1993) was co-written by Nora Ephron and her younger sister, Delia. Director Nora cast Harry and Sally star Meg Ryan, teaming her with Tom Hanks. The resulting film was an enormous success, and Ephron was now established as Hollywood's foremost creator of romantic comedies. A follow-up film, Mixed Nuts, was a commercial disappointment, but Michael, starring John Travolta as an angel, enjoyed solid success at the box office. 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. Ephron's film also serves as a love letter to her beloved Upper West Side. With You've Got Mail, the team of Ephron, Ryan and Hanks scored another huge success.^[8]

In the following years, Nora Ephron pursued a wide variety of projects. 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 took another unusual tack with an offbeat big-screen adaptation of the 1960s television series Bewitched, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. Her 2006 collection of essays, I Feel Bad Abut My Neck: And Other Reflections on Being a Woman, immediately shot to number one on the New York Times best-seller list.

In her film Julie and Julia, she returned to a favorite subject—food—by telling the parallel stories of famed food writer Julia Child and of a contemporary Manhattan woman who sets out to cook her way through every recipe in Childs's classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The 2009 film starred Ephron's friend and previous collaborator, Meryl Streep, as Julia Child. In addition to her books, plays and movies, Ephron writes 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.^[8]

In 1994, she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award.^[10] Ephron's 2002 play Imaginary Friends explores the rivalry between writers Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. She coauthored the play Love, Loss, and What I Wore (based on the book by Ilene Beckerman) with her sister, Delia and it has played to sold out audiences in Canada, New York City, and The Geffen Playhouse in California.

Ephron and Deep Throat[link]

For many years, Ephron was among only a handful of people in the world claiming to know the identity of Deep Throat, the source for news articles written by her husband Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal.^[11] Ephron claims to have guessed the identity of Deep Throat through clues left by Bernstein.^[11] Among them was the fact that Bernstein referred to the source as "My Friend", the same initials as Mark Felt, whom some suspected to be Bernstein's source.^[11]