Nora Ephron,Catcher in the wry

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.

She quickly made a name for herself by writing frank,funny personal essays—about the smallness of her breasts,for example. Her articles were characterised by humour and honesty,written in a clear,direct,understated style.

Ephron got into the movie business after her marriage to Bernstein in 1976. Her first screenplay was for Silkwood,a 1983 film. Ephron followed Silkwood three years later with a screenplay adaptation of her own novel Heartburn. But it was her script for When Harry Met Sally,which became a hit movie in 1989 starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan,that established Ephron’s gift for romantic comedy and for delayed but happy endings.

When Harry Met Sally is probably best remembered for Ryan’s table-pounding faked-orgasm scene with Crystal in Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side,prompting a middle-aged woman sitting nearby to remark to her waiter,indelibly,“I’ll have what she’s having.”

Her other hits include Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Her last film was Julie & Julia (2009),in which Streep played Julia Child. “Nora just looked at every situation and cocked her head and thought,‘Hmmmm,how can I make this more fun?”’ Streep stated.

“You could call on her for anything: doctors,recipes,speeches,or just a few jokes,and we all did it,constantly,” she said.

But in all her moviemaking years she never gave up writing in other forms. Apart from essays she wrote plays. She also became an enthusiastic blogger for The Huffington Post. “Sitting at a table with Nora was like being in a Nora Ephron movie,” writer Sally Quinn said.

Ephron’s collection I Remember Nothing concludes with two lists,one of things she says she won’t miss and one of things she will. Among the “won’t miss” items are dry skin,and the sound of the vacuum cleaner. The list of the things she will miss,begins with “my kids” and “Nick” and ends this way:

“Taking a bath Coming over the bridge to Manhattan Pie.”