Nora Ephron, Catcher in the wry

Charles Mcgrath

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mould (only smarter and funnier, some said) became one of her era's most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, with hits like Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally.

She was a journalist, a blogger, an essayist, a novelist, a playwright, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and a movie director—a rarity in a film industry whose directorial ranks are dominated by men. Her later box-office success included You've Got Mail and Julie & Julia. By the end, she had even become something of a philosopher about age and its indignities.

"Why do people write books that say it's better to be older than to be younger?" she wrote in I Feel Bad About My Neck, her 2006 best-selling collection of essays. "It's not better. Even if you have all your marbles, you're constantly reaching for the name of the person you met the day before yesterday."

Writing was the family business in Nora's family. Her parents were Hollywood screenwriters. "Everything is copy," her mother once said, and she and her husband proved it by turning the college-age Nora into a character in a play, later a movie, Take Her, She's Mine. Equally, Ephron could make sparkling copy out of almost anything else: the wrinkles on her neck, cabbage strudel, Teflon pans and the tastelessness of egg-white omelettes.

She turned her painful breakup with her second husband, the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein, into a best-selling novel, Heartburn, which she then recycled into a successful movie starring Jack Nicholson as a philandering husband and Meryl Streep as a quick-witted version of Ephron herself.

Ephron began her career in journalism, working at the Washington Post and then in the late 1960s she had turned to magazine journalism, at Esquire and New York mostly.

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