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Nora Ephron
Ephron was the oldest of the four daughters of Phoebe and Henry Ephron, successful playwrights and Hollywood screenwriters. She and her sisters Delia, Hallie and Amy sometimes were the inspiration for parts of their parents' writing. The play Take Her, She's Mine, was a comedy based on Nora's letters home from Wellesley College.
After graduating from Wellesley College in 1962, Ephron worked for several years as a journalist in New York. Her columns, which appeared in a number of magazines, notably Esquire and New York, "revealed wry and perceptive observations of relationships between women and men which helped readers laugh." In a 1972 essay, "Fantasies," Ephron wrote that the women's movement helped her see the need for new types of stories, stories that would free women from sexual submissiveness. She published collections of essays: Crazy Salad (1975) and Scribble, Scribble (1978). Heartburn (1983), a novel, was based on the breakup of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, famous for his exposé of the Watergate scandal.
Ephron received Academy Award nominations for the screenplays of Silkwood (1984), When Harry Met Sally (1990) and Sleepless In Seattle (1994). When Harry Met Sally also was nominated for a Golden Globe award. For Ephron's 1996 Wellesley College Commencement address Written by Wilma Slaight
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When
Nora Ephron spoke at Wellesley College Commencement in 1979, she
said "We were born into a society that expected us to be good
girls. . . . We were sent off into a college environment that expected
us to grow up to be soothing women, women who could preside at the
dinner table or at a committee meeting and when two people disagreed,
we would be intelligent enough to step in, soothingly, to point
out the remarkable similarities between the opposing positions.
We were to spend our lives making nice." While admitting that
Wellesley had changed since her day, she believed it still did not
produce the kind of troublemakers the world needed. "I hope
you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble
out there. I also hope you'll choose to make some trouble on behalf
of women."
A
political science major, Ephron served as a Washington Intern in
the White House office of Pierre Salinger. Her senior year she was
Associate Editor of the Wellesley College News.
In
the 1980s Ephron turned her attention to film, first as a writer
[Silkwood, Heartburn, Cookie, When Harry
Met Sally, and My Blue Heaven]; then as producer and
director. "Movies," Ephron said in an interview, "are
the literature of this generation, and all subsequent generations.
It's exciting to know that if you make a movie that in some way
works, you're going to reach people, to become part of their autobiography.
Just as you went to movies when you were a kid and got all your
ideas about x or y from the movies, you can be part of that for
people, you can give that."
