By HILLEL ITALIE, AP National Writer
–
17 mins ago
NEW YORK (AP) — Among a injustices about a genocide of Nora Ephron is that she isn't around to tell us about it.
"She was so, so alive," says her crony Carrie Fisher. "It creates no clarity to me that she isn't alive anymore."
Ephron, a essayist, author and filmmaker who challenged and thrived in a male-dominated worlds of cinema and broadcasting and was loved, reputable and feared for her harmful and ludicrous wit, died Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 71.
Ephron died during 7:40 p.m. during New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, her family pronounced in a matter Tuesday night. She died of leukemia.
Born into a family of screenwriters, a tip publisher in her 20s and 30s, afterwards a best-selling author and successful director, Ephron was among a many quotable and successful writers of her generation. She wrote and unfailing such favorites as "Julie Julia" and "Sleepless in Seattle," and her books enclosed a novel "Heartburn," a knockout roman a clef about her matrimony to Washington Post contributor Carl Bernstein; and a renouned letter collections "I Feel Bad About My Neck" and "I Remember Nothing."
She was tough on others — Bernstein's marital transgressions were immortalized by a horndog associate in "Heartburn," a masculine "capable of carrying sex with a Venetian blind" — and relentless about herself. She wrote plainly about her formidable childhood, her unsuccessful relationships, her doubts about her earthy coming and a hated penetration of age.
"We all demeanour good for a age. Except for a necks," she wrote in a pretension square from "I Feel Bad About My Neck," published in 2006. "Oh, a necks. There are duck necks. There are turkey gobbler necks. There are elephant necks. There are necks with wattles and necks with creases that are on a verge of suitable wattles. … According to my dermatologist, a neck starts to go during 43 and that's that."
Even within a smart-talking pivot of New York-Washington-Los Angeles, no one bettered Ephron, slim and dark-haired, her splendid and forked grin like a one-liner done flesh. Friends from Mike Nichols and Meryl Streep to Calvin Trillin and Pete Hamill precious her for her wisdom, her faithfulness and turns of phrase.
As a screenwriter, Ephron was nominated 3 times for Academy Awards, for "Silkwood," "When Harry Met Sally …" and "Sleepless in Seattle," and was a singular lady to write, approach and furnish Hollywood movies. Fisher and Meg Ryan were among a many actresses who pronounced they desired operative with Ephron since she accepted them so many improved than did her masculine peers.
"I suspect we could contend Nora was my ideal," Fisher said. "In a star where we're told that we can't have it all, Nora consistently valid that proverb wrong. A writer, director, wife, mother, chef, wit — there didn't seem to be anything she couldn't do. And not usually do it, though surpass during it, change it, set a bar for each other screenwriter, novelist, director."
"Nora Ephron was a journalist-artist who knew what was critical to know; how things unequivocally worked, what was worthwhile, who was fascinating and why," pronounced "Sleepless in Seattle" star Tom Hanks. "At a cooking list and on a film set she carried us all with knowledge and wit churned with adore for us and adore for life."
The eldest of 4 children, Ephron was innate in New York to screenwriters Harry and Phoebe Ephron, who changed to Beverly Hills, Calif., when she was 4 years old. Words, words, difference were a atmosphere she breathed. Regular visitors enclosed "Casablanca" co-writer Julius J. Epstein, "Sunset Boulevard" co-operator Charles Brackett, and a group of Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who worked on "The Thin Man" and "It's a Wonderful Life."
Everyone was in movies, "the business."
"People who were not in a business were famous as civilians," Ephron wrote in "I Remember Nothing."
If a best amusement is innate out of sadness, afterwards Ephron was unfailing for comedy. She was 15, she recalled, when her mom became an alcoholic, finishing off a bottle of thwart a night. Her father, too, was a complicated drinker, "sloppy, sentimental," nonetheless "somehow his alcoholism was some-more benign."
Determined by high propagandize to be a journalist, Ephron graduated from a single-sex Wellesley College in 1962, changed to New York and started out as a "mail girl" and fact checker during Newsweek. A journal strike during a finish of a year gave her a chance. Victor Navasky, a destiny editor of The Nation, was afterwards using a satirical repository called a Monacle. He was operative on a satire of a New York Post, "The New York Pest," and asked Ephron for a travesty of Post columnist Leonard Lyons.
She succeeded so good that a newspaper's publisher, Dorothy Schiff, reasoned that anyone who could make fun of a Post could also write for it. Ephron was asked to try out as a reporter. Within a week, she had a permanent pursuit and remained there 5 years. The Post, she after wrote, was a "terrible paper," and she envied her peers during The New York Times and elsewhere who had some-more time to work on stories and had improved entrance to people they wanted to interview.
"But a indicate is this. we was improved off …" she wrote in a introduction to a letter collection "Wallflower during a Orgy, published in 1970. "I schooled to go by a clips, find a names of people from a subject's past, hunt them adult in aged write books, lane them down, and lift out anecdotes they knew. What I'm observant competence seem obvious; though one of a things that stuns me is how occasionally reporters do this."
Ephron began letter for Esquire and The New York Times and grown a inhabitant following as a reversion to a primary of Dorothy Parker and S.J. Perelman and a estimable counterpart of such new and hip reporters as Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe. She lonesome domestic conventions, a feminist transformation and Wellesley, that she labeled a bureau for "docile" women. Part of her present was her uninformed takes on such normal subjects for women as food and fashion, like in a letter "The Food Establishment: Life in a Land of a Rising Souffle (Or Is It a Rising Meringue?)"
"The standard member of a Food Establishment," she wrote, "is given to revelation you, suitable of nothing, how many souffles he has been famous to make in a brief duration of time. … He gossips a good understanding about his colleagues, about what they are cooking, writing, and eating; and whom they are articulate to, about everything, in fact, solely a one thing everybody else in a star gossips about — who is sleeping with whom."
By a 1970s, she had met Bernstein, who teamed with associate Washington Post contributor Bob Woodward on prize-winning coverage of a Watergate liaison that brought down President Nixon. They married in 1976, and had dual children, though adore shortly incited to hatred — and grown into art. Ephron was profound with their second child when she schooled Bernstein was carrying an affair, a profanation that had a rewards, once she stopped crying.
She wrote "Heartburn," after a film starring Streep and Jack Nicholson and unfailing by Nichols, with whom she collaborated often. The book was so tighten to her life that Bernstein threatened to sue. Decades later, a memory of a book's birth was simply summoned.
"Yes, totally, completely, absolutely, sitting during a mythological and long-gone Smith Corona electric typewriter that we once had," she told The Associated Press in 2010. "I was operative on a screenplay and wrote a initial 10 pages of a novel, and we knew a title, knew there were going to be recipes in it. This we remember, accurately where we was, operative and knowing, 'Oh, we see, adequate time has upheld that I'm prepared to do this.'"
Another perk from her time with Bernstein: She sussed out that "Deep Throat," a unnamed and different Watergate source, was in fact FBI central Mark Felt. She would lay that she told large people about Felt, who did not acknowledge his purpose until years later.
Her screenwriting credits enclosed "Heartburn," a chief energy play "Silkwood" and a regretful comedy "When Harry Met Sally …" She twice unfailing a group of Ryan and Hanks, in "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail," and also worked with John Travolta (in a anticipation "Michael"), Steve Martin ("Mixed Nuts") and Nicole Kidman ("Bewitched").
Ephron had a good nose for nonsense, though was adequate a citizen of Hollywood to fall, and tumble hard, for a happy ending. "Sleepless in Seattle," in that Ryan and Hanks play long-distance admirers who accommodate during film's end, was not usually a reconstitute of a weeper "An Affair to Remember," though a reverence to how cinema competence tell us how to live. Ryan and her best pal, played by Rosie O'Donnell, are seen examination "Affair to Remember," that inspires Ryan to advise to Hanks that they accommodate — like Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr — on tip of a Empire State Building, on Valentine's Day.
"That's a chicks' movie," Hanks' impression says when he learns about a film's plot.
Ephron was married 3 times: to Dan Greenburg, Bernstein and, utterly happily, to "Wiseguys" author Nicholas Pileggi, whose book was blending into a Martin Scorsese film "Goodfellas." Sisters Delia, Amy and Hallie Ephron also are writers and Nora and Delia collaborated on such films as "This Is My Life" and "Sleepless in Seattle."
In her letter "The O Word," Nora Ephron expected flourishing too aged to make jokes about her age. She would be "really old," over sex in a hotel room, or even a solidified custard during Shake Shack. It would be good if she believed in a aloft being, though a word "everything happens for a reason" is a oration that usually annoys her.
Ephron wrote of summers in a Hamptons on Long Island when her children were little, of fireworks on a Fourth of Jul and picnics on a beach. She desired a sound of geese in mid-July — "one of a things that done a summers out there so magical." As she aged, a geese reminded her that summer will end, and so will all else.
"I generally began to hatred their sound, that was not violence wings — how could we have ever suspicion it was? — though a lot of uneuphonious honks," she writes. "Now we don't go to Long Island in a summer and we don't hear a geese. Sometimes, instead, we go to Los Angeles, where there are hummingbirds, and we adore to watch them since they're so bustling removing a many out of life."
Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
