Nora Ephron, prolific author and screenwriter, dies at age 71

View Photo Gallery — Nora Ephron dies: Ephron, who emerged over the past four decades as one of America’s warmest and most acute chroniclers of contemporary culture and society, has died. She was 71.

By Adam Bernstein, Wednesday, June 27-The Washington Post

“Take notes,” Nora Ephron’s mother advised her as a child. “Everything is copy.”
Her mother, a Broadway playwright and Hollywood screenwriter, imbued Ms. Ephron with a razor-sharp self-awareness and the ambition to transform workaday absurdities, cultural idiosyncracies, romantic foibles and even marital calamity into essays, novels and films brimming with invitingly mordant wit. She credited her mother with bestowing “this kind of terrific ability, not to avoid pain but to turn it over and recycle it as soon as possible.”

Nora Ephron, who gained a devoted following for her perceptive, deeply personal essays and parlayed that renown into a screenwriting career of wistful romantic comedies “When Harry Met Sally” and “You’ve Got Mail,” the marital exposé“Heartburn” and the whistleblower drama “Silkwood,” died June 26 at a hospital in New York. She was 71.
The death was confirmed by her friend Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist. She died of complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia, with which she was diagnosed six years ago.
Full piece at The Washington Post