Celebrity Biographies
Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron, one of the few female directors who have excelled in Hollywood, has died at the age of 71 in her hometown, New York. The director of Something to Remember and You Have an Email suffered from leukemia, and she has died due to a complication of pneumonia.
Spark for sophisticated and romantic comedy, and the creation of female characters with enormous popular appeal. Nora Ephron decidedly rose to fame for her screenplay for When Harry Met Sally , directed by her great friend Rob Reiner , where she questioned whether friendship between a man and a woman was possible without intermediating sex. The scene in which Meg Ryan faked an orgasm in a restaurant to the astonishment of the audience made a time in 1989, although it is fair to say that today it would barely arouse a slight smile.
Nora Ephron was born in New York on May 19, 1941 and is the eldest of three sisters; with Delia Ephron she would go on to share screenwriting credit on several films. Of course, writing scripts for the movies is a family thing, of Jewish origin, since his parents, Henry Ephron and Phoebe Ephron , signed several scripts together, for films like Captain Newman , Carousel or Dad, Long Legs . As a child she would go with her parents to live in Beverly Hills. And apparently a character in Gift for a Bachelor (1963) was inspired by Nora.
He studied at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and soon began a literary and journalistic career publishing novels and essay books such as “The Neck Doesn’t Deceive” , and writing for Newsweek and Esquire. Her first more-or-less professional encounter with film was a rewrite of William Goldman ‘s script for All the President’s Men (1976) with her then-husband Carl Bernstein , although it would not be used. Although she was involved in the script for some TV movies, her career did not take off until she signed the script for Silkwood (1983), a film by Mike Nichols based on true events, which warns about the dangers of nuclear energy, and in which she starred meryl streepinto one of Ephron’s typical strong female characters. Precisely the actress and Nichols would repeat with Ephron in The cake is over (1986), an irregular and partially autobiographical dramatic comedy with Jack Nicholson , based on a novel by her, being also the author of the script.
With When Harry Met Sally (1989) a new actress enters Ephron’s film universe, it is Meg Ryan. There was chemistry with Billy Crystal and the author’s typical romanticism was beginning to take on well-defined traits. The script was nominated for an Oscar, as Silkwood ‘s had been and would be for Something to Remember (1993), a true moment of creative fulfillment for the filmmaker in her second film as a director after her discreet debut in What’s Wrong with breast? (1992). Meg Ryan and Tom Hanksthey became the quintessential romantic couple, and the story of the boy who calls the radio at Christmas to ask for a mother to accompany him and his widowed father moved audiences with its clever reminiscences of Leo McCarey ‘s You and Me .
After the angelic Michael (1996) with John Travolta , he again turned to classic cinema with You Have Email (1998), repeating with the Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan couple in a remake of Ernst Lubitsch ‘s The Bazaar of Surprises , with that anonymous correspondence between lovers via the internet and the competition between two different ways of conceiving the book business. From here on, Ephron’s work declines, Colgadas (1999), Winning Combination (2000) and Bewitched (2005) are not memorable, much less . Yes, his latest film is of interest, again resorting to new technologies (blogs) and real events, Julie and Julia(2009), in which he teamed up again with Meryl Streep to tell a two-part story around the world of cooking recipes.
Nora Ephron was married three times: to fellow screenwriter Dan Greenburg , to the famous journalist who uncovered Watergate Carl Bernstein, who gave her two children, and to writer Nicholas Pileggi . In the aforementioned book “The neck does not deceive” Ephron spoke of the unmentionable subject of death, which she turned around after her best friend died of an unexpected illness, with a quick and unfortunate end; there was no room for transcendence in Ephron, but there were some considerations that do not consist of the simple closing of the eyes with which so many address such an inevitable issue.