She also scored her third Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. The film earned more than $120 million at the box office, once again showing Hollywood that Ephron was a formidable filmmaker. The next year, Ephron directed and wrote the wildly successful Sleepless in Seattle, which featured Ryan and Tom Hanks as two people who live on opposite coasts and fall in love after Ryan hears Hanks on the radio and tracks him down. Ephron co-wrote the screenplay with her sister, Delia Ephron. The film was generally well-received, with Time magazine calling it a 'charming and quietly confident movie' that is both 'adorable and unsentimental.' This family drama centered on a single mother who is pursuing a career in stand-up comedy.

In 1992, Ephron directed her first film, This Is My Life. She received her second Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay for the film. Audiences and critics alike responded enthusiastically to the well-crafted exploration into whether a man and a woman can be just friends and the relationship that develops between the lead characters.

While that film received much praise, she really hit box office gold with her screenplay for When Harry Met Sally, starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in the title roles. It earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Commercial SuccessĪround this time, Ephron made the leap into films, writing the screenplay for the drama Silkwood (1983). Her first novel, Heartburn (1983), drew inspiration from the end of her second marriage and was later made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. In 1970, her articles collected and published in 1970's Wallflower at the Orgy and 1975's Crazy Salad. Gifted with a sharp wit, Ephron first made her mark as an essayist. She went east to go to school at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The daughter of writers, she grew up in Los Angeles, feeling much like an outsider.

Early Life and CareerĮphron was born on May 19, 1941, in New York, New York. Ephron died from pneumonia, caused by acute myeloid leukemia, on June 26, 2012, at the age of 71. Later, she wrote and directed Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and Julie & Julia (2009). Ephron wrote the screenplay for the romantic comedy classic When Harry Met Sally. Nora Ephron's essays first garnered attention in the early 1970s, and by the 1980s, and then she began to transition into screenwriting.

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