Nora Ephron made everything copy, except the illness she hid to the end

Nora Ephron

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 19, 1941 New York City, United States
Died	June 26, 2012 (71)
Occupation	Screenwriter, film director and essayist
Known for	Crimes and Misdemeanors, Husbands and Wives
Awards	BAFTA · Women in Film Crystal · WGA East Ian McLellan Hunter (lifetime achievement) · American Academy of Achievement Golden Plate

Her mother, a Hollywood screenwriter, had one line for every misfortune that came her daughters’ way: everything is copy. Nora Ephron took it as an instruction. Her flat chest became an Esquire column, a husband’s affair became a bestselling novel, and her ageing throat became the title of a book. When doctors found the blood disease that would eventually kill her, though, she told almost no one and wrote around it. A woman who confessed for a living kept her last story to herself, and that gap is the clearest way into her work.

She was the eldest of four daughters of Henry and Phoebe Ephron, a husband-and-wife screenwriting team, and was named after the heroine of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. The family moved from New York, where Nora was born, to Beverly Hills, and the house was full of writers: Delia, Hallie and Amy all ended up in the trade. Her parents even put her on stage, building the ingénue of their play Take Her, She’s Mine from her letters home from college. The daughter wanted to be Dorothy Parker, and after a political science degree at Wellesley College she went back to New York to try.

Newsweek, which she approached after graduating in 1962, told her it did not hire women as writers, so she sorted the mail. A parody she wrote of the New York Post got her hired by the Post itself, where she spent five years as a reporter and broke the news of Bob Dylan‘s private wedding to Sara Lownds. At Esquire she found her register. “A Few Words About Breasts” made her the bad child of the New Journalism, and she spent the column picking fights a careful career woman would have avoided: she scolded Betty Friedan for feuding with Gloria Steinem and accused her own college of turning out “a generation of docile and unadventurous women.”

Film arrived sideways. In the mid-1970s she and her second husband, the Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, rewrote the script of All the President’s Men. Their version went unused, but someone who read it offered her a television movie, and the screenwriting career started there. With Alice Arlen she wrote Silkwood for Mike Nichols, with Meryl Streep as the nuclear-plant whistleblower Karen Silkwood, and earned her first Academy Award nomination.

Then came the book that put her mother’s rule to its most literal use. Pregnant with their second son, Ephron discovered that Bernstein was having an affair with the British journalist Margaret Jay. Heartburn, the novel she made of it, described a husband “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind,” and Nichols filmed it with Streep and Jack Nicholson from Ephron’s own screenplay. Bernstein threatened to sue. He never did.

When Harry Met Sally… made her the screenwriter everyone quotes. She built Harry on its director, Rob Reiner, and Sally on herself; Meg Ryan suggested the fake orgasm at Katz’s Deli, and Billy Crystal supplied the punchline, “I’ll have what she’s having,” delivered by Reiner’s mother, Estelle. The script won the BAFTA for best original screenplay and brought a second Oscar nomination.

She moved behind the camera with This Is My Life, written with Delia from a Meg Wolitzer novel, a film she later said she made “completely for Woody Allen.” Sleepless in Seattle followed, with Tom Hanks as a widower whose son phones a radio show to find him a wife and Meg Ryan as the stranger who falls for his voice. It was one of the year’s biggest hits and her third Oscar nomination, which went instead to Jane Campion’s The Piano. Michael put John Travolta in angel wings, and You’ve Got Mail reunited Hanks and Ryan as a chain-store heir and the children’s bookseller he is putting out of business, their romance conducted by email and loosely adapted from Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner.

The hits boxed her in. The Hanks and Ryan films turned her name into a label for warm, wistful romance, and the label did not always hold. Mixed Nuts, a Christmas comedy adapted from the French farce Le Père Noël est une ordure, flopped; Bewitched, with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, drew poor reviews. The larger cost is how the label reads her backwards. The journalist who mocked her alma mater and picked fights with feminist leaders gets filed as the inventor of the meet-cute, and Heartburn, a revenge novel by a woman humiliated in public, is remembered as a cookbook with a divorce in it. Her rule cut in one direction only, too: the people she turned into copy, Bernstein first among them, never got to edit the draft.

The last decade belonged mostly to the stage and the page. Imaginary Friends put Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy’s feud on Broadway. I Feel Bad About My Neck became a bestseller about ageing in 2006, the same year she was diagnosed with myelodysplasia and decided that the news would only hurt her career. With Delia she wrote Love, Loss, and What I Wore, and in Julie & Julia she cast Streep as Julia Child opposite Amy Adams and said that if she had a religion, it was butter. A last collection, I Remember Nothing, came out in 2010. She died of pneumonia brought on by leukemia at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan on 26 June 2012, five weeks after turning 71.

She married three times: the writer Dan Greenburg, then Bernstein, with whom she had two sons, Jacob and Max, and from 1987 the screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, who was with her until the end. From her second marriage she also took a secret she refused to keep. Having read that Bernstein’s notes called Deep Throat, the Watergate source, “MF,” she guessed the FBI’s Mark Felt, and she told any audience that asked. “No one, apart from my sons, believed me,” she said. She was right.

The afterlife has kept her working. Lucky Guy, her play about the New York tabloid columnist Mike McAlary, reached Broadway in 2013 with Hanks in the lead and earned a posthumous Tony nomination for best play. Jacob Bernstein’s HBO documentary took her mother’s motto as its title, Everything Is Copy, and turned it on the one subject she withheld. Tribeca gives a Nora Ephron Prize to women filmmakers, Steven Spielberg dedicated The Post to her, and in March 2026 Penguin Random House published Someday This Will Be a Funny Story, a short book of her lines. What the work still argues is that the woman who tells the joke first owns the story. The silence at the end belongs to the same argument: copy was a choice she made every time, and the last time she chose not to.