Nora Ephron is dead at 71. 
 
 Ephron died of complications from myelodysplasia, a blood disorder she was diagnosed with six years ago, The Washington Post reports. 
 
 The beloved screenwriter, who brought to life award-winning films including "Silkwood," "When Harry Met Sally...," "Sleepless in Seattle," "You've Got Mail" and, most recently "Julie & Julia," belonged to America's top tier of filmmakers, but her talents extended far beyond Hollywood. Ephron was also an accomplished essayist, novelist and reporter, not to mention the Editor-at-Large of The Huffington Post. 
 
 Raised in Beverly Hills, Ephron graduated from Wellesley College before beginning her career as a journalist at the New York Post. She then went on to write about the 1970s women's movement for Esquire. 
 
 "Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady," Ephron told Wellesley's Class of 1996 in a commencement speech. "I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women." 
 
 Ephron had the wit and the guts to follow her own advice. 
 
 "She was the funniest feminist, or pseudofeminist, depending on whom you ask," Ariel Levy observed in a 2009 profile of Ephron published by The New Yorker. 
 
 In her work and in her life, Ephron refused to settle for predictability. "Every 10 years or so there was a moment when I'd say, even subconsciously, 'Is that all there is?'" she told Ladies' Home Journal in 2009. "You've got to find ways to keep it fresh for yourself. To do the thing, as they say, that is a stretch." 
 
 In 1976, Ephron married Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein (she was previously married to writer Dan Greenburg for nine years) on the heels of his induction into the journalism hall of fame. Bernstein and his fellow reporter Bob Woodward had chased down the Watergate scandal, which ended the presidency of President Richard Nixon. 
 
 "Carl and Nora were the Brad and Jen of the early eighties," Levy wrote. 
 
 Like many power couples, this one ended in divorce -- after four years. 
 
 Following her second divorce, Ephron wrote the Academy Award-winning screenplay for "Silkwood," starring Kurt Russell and Meryl Streep. Ephron and Streep would collaborate again on 1986's "Heartburn" and 2009's "Julie & Julia." 
 
 "Directing movies is the best job there is, that's all," Ephron told the UK's Independent in 1993. "I can hardly say a word after that. It's just a great job. I just want to go on making movies, and some of them will be completely meaningless, except, of course, to me." 
 
 Ephron is perhaps best known for her 1989 film, "When Harry Met Sally...," which has become a cultural mainstay. 
 
 "'When Harry Met Sally...' is kind of a dark movie," director Nicolas Stoller told The Huffington Post in 2012. "It's sweet and it ends beautifully and romantic, but those are two pretty messed up characters. They're pretty flawed. They do pretty nasty things to each other. It goes to a dark, pretty real place between them. That's why it's a classic. [Screenwriter] Nora Ephron does not pull her punches in that movie." 
 
 Tom Hanks, who starred in not one, but two now-classic Ephron rom-coms -- "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993) and "You've Got Mail" (1998) -- said, "Working on a movie with Nora is kind of like going to a dinner party of hers. There's a lot of great conversation. There's a certain amount of screwing around but, by and large, you wind up talking about what Nora dictates you're going to wind up talking about." 
 
 In recent years, Ephron had grown increasingly aware of her mortality. In her latest book, "I Remember Nothing: And other Reflections" (2010) she writes: "You do get to a certain point in life where you have to realistically, I think, understand that the days are getting shorter, and you can't put things off thinking you'll get to them someday. If you really want to do them, you better do them. There are simply too many people getting sick, and sooner or later you will. So I'm very much a believer in knowing what it is that you love doing so you can do a great deal of it." 
 
 Ephron is survived by her husband, screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi and her two sons, Jacob and Max Bernstein. A memorial has been planned for Thursday, June 28, in New York. 
 
 For more coverage on remembering Nora Ephron: 
 
 Nora Ephron Nora Ephron ||||| Correction: An earlier version of this obituary incorrectly described one of Ephron’s three Academy Award nominations for best original screenplay. In addition to her nominations for “Silkwood” and “When Harry Met Sally,” the nomination she shared with Jeff Arch and David S. Ward was for “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), not “You’ve Got Mail” (1998). She wrote the latter screenplay with her sister ­Delia Ephron, not with Arch and Ward. This version has been corrected. 
 
 “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 idiosyncrasies, 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 such as “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, a Washington Post columnist. She died of complications from the blood disorder myelodysplasia, which was diagnosed six years ago. 
 
 As a young woman, Ms. Ephron modeled her self-deprecating and deadpan writing style on Dorothy Parker, part of the Algonquin Round Table of sophisticated New York writers and humorists that also included Robert Benchley and S.J. Perelman. Of the philandering husband in her 1983 novel “Heartburn” — modeled on her marriage to former Washington Post journalist Carl Bernstein — Ms. Ephron wrote he was “capable of having sex with a Venetian blind.” 
 
 In time, Ms. Ephron became a social confederate of New York playwrights, filmmakers and wits, including Mike Nichols, Woody Allen and Calvin Trillin; Washington journalists including former Post executive editor Benjamin Bradlee and his journalist wife, Sally Quinn; and a Hollywood coterie that included Rob Reiner, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin and Steven Spielberg. 
 
 As a woman in the male-dominated movie business, Ms. Ephron was a rare “triple-hyphenate” as writer, director and producer. But making movies for and about women was a battle, at times. She observed how, to male studio moguls, “a movie about a woman’s cure for cancer is less interesting than a movie about a man with a hangnail.” 
 
 From her early years as a journalist for Esquire and New York magazines, Ms. Ephron was regarded as a keen cultural barometer. She repeatedly channeled her interest in the zeitgeist to the screen. Her last film, “Julie & Julia” (2009), starring Meryl Streep as the French-cooking apostle Julia Child and Amy Adams as a modern disciple, explored the trendy fascination with blogging and gourmet cooking. 
 
 In “Silkwood” (1983), a biographical drama directed by Nichols and starring Streep as a plutonium plant employee and union activist, Ms. Ephron tapped into the era’s fear of nuclear meltdowns and corporate coverups. Her novel and 1986 screenplay for “Heartburn” — which starred Streep and Jack Nicholson — reflected what countless other women were experiencing through their disappointing marriages and efforts to balance career ambitions with homemaking obligations. 
 
 The tension between the sexes also played a central role in her sparkling screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally” (1989), which Reiner directed and which starred Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as yuppies who forgo sex with each other for decades to maintain their friendship. As a writer and director, Ms. Ephron was among the first to chronicle the addictive thrill of romance by e-mail in “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), starring Hanks and Ryan. 
 
 Ms. Ephron received three Oscar nominations for her writing, for “Silkwood” (shared with Alice Arlen), “Sleepless in Seattle” (with David S. Ward and Jeff Arch) and “When Harry Met Sally.” 
 
 The most unforgettable — and oft-quoted — scene from “When Harry Met Sally” showed Ryan faking a loud orgasm in front of Crystal over lunch at a delicatessen. After Ryan’s intense moment, a woman at a nearby booth tells the waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having.” 
 
 Ms. Ephron said it was Ryan’s idea to film the scene in the deli, and it was Crystal who came up with the one-liner. But the core idea came from talks between Ms. Ephron and Reiner. 
 
 “One day, we were sitting around and Rob said to me, ‘You know, we’ve told you all this stuff that you didn’t know about men, now you tell us something we don’t know about women,’ ” Ms. Ephron told an audience at a book reading in 2006. “It was almost like, ‘I dare you.’ And I said, ‘Well, women fake orgasms.’ And he said, ‘Not with me.’ ” 
 
 “And I said, ‘Yes, we do,’ ” she added. “Maybe not all the time, but sometimes. He still didn’t believe me. So we went thundering into the bullpen at Castle Rock Pictures where all the women work, and he asked them, ‘Is it true that women fake orgasms?’ And all these women nodded yes. What a shock that scene was for men.” 
 
 “That’s my career, right there,” Ms. Ephron quipped. 
 
 Nora Louise Ephron was born May 19, 1941, in Manhattan and raised in Beverly Hills, Calif., where she once joked of “loving the smell of mink, the smell of the pavement after it rained and the smell of dollar bills.” 
 
 Her parents were prosperous but heavy-drinking Broadway playwrights, Henry Ephron and the former Phoebe Wolkind, and Nora was the first of their four daughters. The younger Ephron siblings, Amy, Delia and Hallie, also became writers. 
 
 From their earliest years, the Ephron children were trained to come to the dinner table prepared to tell stories. Nora Ephron said that many of the tales — how a younger sister got her head caught in the banister and the fire department came to the rescue — became plot devices in their parents’ films. Years later, Nora Ephron’s letters home from Wellesley College were the source of her parents’ Broadway comedy “Take Her, She’s Mine” (1961), which became a film starring James Stewart and Sandra Dee. 
 
 After graduating in 1962 from Wellesley, Ms. Ephron spent five years as a general assignment reporter at the New York Post before leaving daily journalism in 1968 to freelance for large-circulation magazines such as Good Housekeeping. Many of the pieces, on cultural trends, were published in her first book-length collection, “Wallflower at the Orgy” (1970). 
 
 As the women’s movement gained traction in the decade that followed, Ms. Ephron was often invited to discuss it on television and in articles for Esquire and New York magazines. She brought a strikingly light-hearted touch to her deeply felt belief in women’s rights. 
 
 “I have always thought it was a terrible shame that the women’s movement didn’t realize how much easier it was to reach people by making them laugh than by shaking a fist and saying don’t you see how oppressed you are,” she told Newsday in 1976. 
 
 Her 1975 collection “Crazy Salad: Some Things about Women” included essays on vaginal deodorants, a Pillsbury bake-off, her Wellesley reunion and, one of her most reprinted articles, “A Few Words About Breasts.” She reminisced about how her flat chest made her feel like an outlier in a world that fetishized large breasts. But the trauma began at home. 
 
 “My mother was really hateful about bras,” she wrote, “and by the time my third sister had gotten to the point where she was ready to want one, my mother had worked the whole business into a comedy routine. ‘Why not use a Band-Aid instead?’ she would say.” 
 
 Her next collection, “Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media” (1978), was based on her tenure as a media columnist for Esquire in the mid-1970s. At the time, she was married to Bernstein, whose collaboration at The Post with Bob Woodward helped uncover the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation. 
 
 Her first marriage, to Dan Greenburg, author of books including “How to Be a Jewish Mother,” ended in divorce. She had married Bernstein in 1976 and was seven months pregnant with her second child when she discovered her husband was having an affair with Margaret Jay, the wife of the British ambassador. She delivered the child prematurely, and the marriage smashed apart in an ugly and public way, garnering coverage in People magazine and other publications. 
 
 Ms. Ephron later said that it was impossible to resist writing about her marriage, telling The Post that “although it was the most awful thing I’ve ever been through . . . it was by far the most interesting.” 
 
 The result was “Heartburn,” a roman a clef about her marriage to Bernstein with the characters changed to a cookbook author married to a randy syndicated columnist; the book also included recipes, including writer Lillian Hellman’s for pot roast. Reviews were mixed, but the notoriety surrounding its publication — one of the nation’s most prominent writers wreaking revenge on another — propelled “Heartburn” to the bestseller lists. 
 
 “Obviously, I wish Nora hadn’t written the book,” Bernstein, then working at ABC News, told The Post at the time. “But I’ve always known she writes about her life. Nora goes to the supermarket and she uses it for material.” 
 
 In 1987, she married Nicholas Pileggi, a journalist, author and screenwriter of such films as the mobster dramas “GoodFellas” (1990) and “Casino” (1995). Besides Pileggi and her three sisters, survivors include two sons from her second marriage, Jacob Bernstein of New York and Max Bernstein of Los Angeles. 
 
 As a filmmaker, Ms. Ephron could be derivative. “You’ve Got Mail” was partly inspired by the pen-pal romance classic “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940). Ms. Ephron also borrowed heavily from the Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr romantic drama “An Affair to Remember” (itself a remake of an earlier film) for her 1993 star-crossed romance “Sleepless in Seattle” with Hanks and Ryan. 
 
 If her career also had its share of movie duds — among them, the witness-protection comedy “My Blue Heaven” (1990) and the sitcom remake “Bewitched” (2005) — Ms. Ephron remained widely admired for a productive career in a field that often marginalized women who didn’t produce blockbusters or Oscar champs. 
 
 “Nora Ephron has quietly been one of the most significant women in film history,” said movie scholar and historian Jeanine D. Basinger. 
 
 Ms. Ephron remained a prolific essayist for publications including the New York Times and O magazine. One of her last collections, “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman” (2006), was triggered by what she once called “the menopause that some of us remember so unfondly.” 
 
 In keeping with her mother’s admonition, she was candid in sharing her intimate fears of aging. She explored the loss of physical and mental acuity (“I spend time getting into shape; then something breaks”). She expressed astonishment that one of her contemporaries, former White House intern Mimi Fahnestock, had kept silent about her affair with President John F. Kennedy for more than 40 years. 
 
 Ms. Ephron wrote of being a White House press aide at the same time and lamented that she was “probably the only young woman who ever worked in the Kennedy White House whom the president did not make a pass at. Perhaps it was my permanent wave, which was a truly unfortunate mistake. Perhaps it was my wardrobe, which mostly consisted of multicolored dynel dresses that looked like distilled Velveeta cheese.” 
 
 “Perhaps it’s because I’m Jewish,” she added. “Don’t laugh, think about it, think about that long, long list of women J.F.K. slept with. Were any Jewish? I don’t think so. 
 
 “On the other hand, perhaps it’s simply because J.F.K. somehow sensed that discretion was not my middle name. I mean, I assure you if anything had gone on between the two of us, you would not have had to wait this long to find it out.” ||||| Nora Ephron , an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally...,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71. 
 
 The cause was pneumonia brought on by acute myeloid leukemia, her son Jacob Bernstein said. 
 
 In a commencement address she delivered in 1996 at Wellesley College, her alma mater, Ms. Ephron recalled that women of her generation weren’t expected to do much of anything. But she wound up having several careers, all of them successfully and many of them simultaneously. 
 
 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 were and continue to be dominated by men. Her later box-office success included “You’ve Got Mail” and “Julie & Julia.” By the end of her life, though remaining remarkably youthful looking, 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.” 
 
 Nora Ephron was born on May 19, 1941, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the eldest of four sisters, all of whom became writers. That was no surprise; writing was the family business. Her father, Henry, and her mother, the former Phoebe Wolkind, were Hollywood screenwriters who wrote, among other films, “Carousel,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business” and “Captain Newman, M.D.” 
 
 “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.” The lesson was not lost on Ms. Ephron, who seldom wrote about her own children but could make sparkling copy out of almost anything else: the wrinkles on her neck, her apartment, cabbage strudel, Teflon pans and the tastelessness of egg-white omelets. 
 
 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 Ms. Ephron herself. 
 
 When Ms. Ephron was 4, her parents moved from New York to Beverly Hills, where she grew up, graduating from Beverly Hills High School in 1958. At Wellesley, she began writing for the school newspaper, and in the summer of 1961 she was a summer intern in the Kennedy White House. She said later that perhaps her greatest accomplishment there was rescuing the speaker of the house, Sam Rayburn, from a men’s room in which he had inadvertently locked himself. In an essay for The New York Times in 2003, she said she was also probably the only intern that President John F. Kennedy had never hit on. 
 
 After graduation from college in 1962, she moved to New York, a city she always adored, intent on becoming a journalist. Her first job was as a mail girl at Newsweek. (There were no mail boys, she later pointed out.) Soon she was contributing to a parody of The New York Post put out during the 1962 newspaper strike. Her piece of it earned her a tryout at The Post, where the publisher, Dorothy Schiff, remarked: “If they can parody The Post, they can write for it. Hire them.” 
 
 Ms. Ephron stayed at The Post for five years, covering stories like the Beatles, the Star of India robbery at the American Museum of Natural History, and a pair of hooded seals at the Coney Island aquarium that refused to mate. 
 
 “The Post was a terrible newspaper in the era I worked there,” she wrote, but added that the experience taught her to write short and to write around a subject, since the kinds of people she was assigned to cover were never going to give her much interview time. 
 
 In the late 1960s Ms. Ephron 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 — and tart, sharply observed profiles of people like Ayn Rand, Helen Gurley Brown and the composer and best-selling poet Rod McKuen. Some of these articles were controversial. In one, she criticized Betty Friedan for conducting a “thoroughly irrational” feud with Gloria Steinem; in another, she discharged a withering assessment of Women’s Wear Daily. 
 
 But all her articles were characterized by humor and honesty, written in a clear, direct, understated style marked by an impeccable sense of when to deploy the punchline. (Many of her articles were assembled in the collections “Wallflower at the Orgy,” “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble Scribble.”) 
 
 Ms. Ephron made as much fun of herself as of anyone else. She was labeled a practitioner of the New Journalism, with its embrace of novelistic devices in the name of reaching a deeper truth, but she always denied the connection. “I am not a new journalist, whatever that is,” she once wrote. “I just sit here at the typewriter and bang away at the old forms.” 
 
 Ms. Ephron got into the movie business more or less by accident after her marriage to Mr. Bernstein in 1976. He and Bob Woodward, his partner in the Watergate investigation, were unhappy with William Goldman’s script for the movie version of their book “All the President’s Men,” so Mr. Bernstein and Ms. Ephron took a stab at rewriting it. Their version was ultimately not used, but it was a useful learning experience, she later said, and it brought her to the attention of people in Hollywood. 
 
 Her first screenplay, written with her friend Alice Arlen, was for “Silkwood,” a 1983 film based on the life of Karen Silkwood, who died under suspicious circumstances while investigating abuses at a plutonium plant where she had worked. Ms. Arlen was in film school then, and Ms. Ephron had scant experience writing for anything other than the page. But Mike Nichols, who directed the movie (which starred Ms. Streep and Kurt Russell), said that the script made an immediate impression on him. He and Ms. Ephron had become friends when she visited him on the set of “Catch-22.” 
 
 Paul Vitello contributed reporting. ||||| The first time I read Nora Ephron, I was in a bookstore in Kathmandu and I was twenty-two and very lonely. I picked up a pink copy of “Heartburn” and sat on the floor of the shop next to my enormous and filthy backpack and I didn’t get up again until I’d finished the book. I no longer felt lonesome. 
 
 Ephron’s voice was funny, frank, self-effacing but never self-pitying, and utterly intimate: “That’s how bourgeois I am: at the split second I picked up the pie to throw at Mark, at the split second I was about to do the bravest—albeit the most derivative—thing I had ever done in my life, I thought to myself: Thank God the floor is linoleum and can be wiped up.” She was telling a tale of woe—the story, I didn’t realize at the time, of her famous marriage to Carl Bernstein and its unravelling—but it was somehow deeply comforting: hers was a world where humor always trumped loss. 
 
 Ephron, who died of leukemia on Tuesday night at the age of seventy-one, was an artist of consolation, on the page and in her movies. One of the reasons you can watch “Sleepless in Seattle” (which she directed) or “When Harry Met Sally” (which she wrote) over and over again is because not only are they funny, they are profoundly reassuring. She was like that in person, too. “Whatever city you’re in, if you walk into something and get something in your eye, she knows the great eye doctor in that city and immediately gets you over there,” her friend Mike Nichols told me a few years ago when I profiled her. “Nora knows what to do: I think that’s the main thing about her.” 
 
 That plucky confidence was with her even as a child, growing up “athletic, ambitious, outspoken, competitive, noisy, rambunctious,” as she once wrote, in a “house full of apples and peaches and milk” in Beverly Hills, the daughter of two screenwriters. She was a Wellesley girl, who first gained prominence as a columnist for Esquire, covering the burgeoning women’s movement in the early seventies, and became a Washington celebrity when she married Bernstein, in 1976. After they split she wrote her first screenplay, “Silkwood,” and was promptly nominated for an Oscar. She was nominated for Academy Awards twice more as she developed her own particular breed of romantic comedy, full of tart wit and unrepentant romanticism, often starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. “Nobody does that kind of entertainment better than Nora—the sheer professionalism is exhilarating,” said Joan Didion, her friend of nearly fifty years. She believed in happy endings, and got one, when she married her third husband, the writer Nick Pileggi, twenty-five years ago. Ephron is also survived by her sons Jacob and Max Bernstein, and her sisters, Delia, Hallie, and Amy. 
 
 But for many of her readers and fans, this will surely feel like a personal loss. That sense she gave me back in Kathmandu of suddenly having an arch and insightful new best friend, under whose spell everything would come out all right in the end, was a gift she kept giving to strangers—women in particular—throughout her life, from her early essays about her small breasts to her best-selling lament on aging, “I Feel Bad About My Neck.” “The amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming,” she wrote in that book. “Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.” 
 
 Photograph by Ruven Afanador, 2009. ||||| Tom Hanks swears. Not a blue streak, no, but it’s bracing to hear profanity from the man who has defined decency for three decades in Hollywood, playing white knights in “Splash,” “Forrest Gump,” “Apollo 13” and the “Toy Story” series. If he is grandma-friendly on screen, he is looser and less predictable in person — as his old friend Nora Ephron was reminded several years ago when she sent him the screenplay for a biopic, “Lucky Guy.” Mr. Hanks took an instant dislike to his character, Mike McAlary, the muckraking columnist of New York City tabloids in the 1980s and ’90s. 
 
 “I told Nora that McAlary sounded like a real” jerk, Mr. Hanks said, using a more piquant word — and a perceptive one, since McAlary’s power came from his determination to be the biggest, baddest, bona fide ... jerk who ever dug into corrupt cops. 
 
 Mr. Hanks reconsidered only years later, after running into Ephron while promoting his 2011 movie “Larry Crowne.” He was a co-writer, a star and the director of that picture, and it was a critical and commercial disappointment. Ephron, by contrast, represented happier days, during their collaborations on “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail.” 
 
 They got around to talking about “Lucky Guy” — she had turned it into a play, and Hugh Jackman had done a table reading — and Mr. Hanks asked to see the latest version. This time he felt drawn not only to McAlary’s swagger, but also his drive to become the next Jimmy Breslin and to be worthy of his own celebrity. 
 
 “Look, the title is ‘Lucky Guy.’ It’s about somebody who is almost good enough to deserve what he achieves. And I understand that,” Mr. Hanks said during an interview on the stage of the Broadhurst Theater, where the play, his Broadway debut, is set to begin its 15-week run on Friday. 
 
 “I still feel sometimes that I’d like to be as good as so-and-so actor,” he continued. “I see some other actors’ work, and I think I’ll never get there. I wish I could.” 
 
 Hollywood stars often come to Broadway to prove something to themselves or to audiences, though they rarely admit it. With Academy Awards for “Philadelphia” and “Forrest Gump,” Mr. Hanks is less hesitant. While he denied that, at 56, he is here because his film career has cooled — “I have two movies in the can. I have plenty to keep me busy” — he also appeared delighted that McAlary is pretty far from a predictable Tom Hanks part. 
 
 Will audiences buy him as unlikable? Mr. Hanks is still a genial guy, who tends to cope with pressure by yukking it up. But he has also thrown himself into a role that calls for no vanity, his director and fellow actors say. He has a gray-flecked mustache, as did McAlary, and is trying to preserve the columnist’s rough edges. 
 
 “Anytime you go off to do something new, you’ve involved in a reinvention, and any actor who says otherwise is just trying to lower expectations,” said Mr. Hanks, who trained to be a theater actor in the 1970s but quickly moved on to television and then movies. 
 
 It has been a twisting path to Broadway for Mr. Hanks and “Lucky Guy,” and a heartbreaking one. The sharp-elbowed McAlary, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his columns about the brutalization of Abner Louima by police officers, died later that year from colon cancer, at the age of 41. Soon after, Ephron, a former reporter for The New York Post who cherished the tabloids of yesteryear, began to research McAlary’s life and spent years rewriting the script, at one point calling it “Stories About McAlary.” 
 
 Once Mr. Hanks signed on, Ephron began meeting weekly with the play’s director, the Tony Award winner George C. Wolfe (“Angels in America”), to sharpen the central device — other journalists sharing and arguing over anecdotes about McAlary — so that the lead character came into sharper focus. All the while, however, Ephron was quietly battling leukemia; to the shock of her “Lucky Guy” collaborators and many friends, she died last June, at 71. 
 
 “Nora was turning around new drafts of the play in a week, and it was confusing to me why she was working so quickly,” Mr. Wolfe said. “I had no awareness of the invisible timetable she was on. After she died, we were even more determined to do the play.” 
 
 Writers are a pretty hands-on lot, especially with new works going to Broadway. Without Ephron, Mr. Wolfe and Mr. Hanks have become keepers of the “Lucky Guy” flame. Aside from Ephron’s script, there are pages of discarded dialogue that Mr. Wolfe has cherry-picked for an extra dash of nuance or sprinkle of clarity. “My motto is, ‘When in doubt, reference Nora,’ ” Mr. Wolfe said, and he has done so with the blessing of her widower, the writer Nicholas Pileggi. 
 
 Mr. Hanks, meanwhile, read many of McAlary’s columns and interviewed some of his old friends, coming away agreeing with a point Ephron once made about him. “Nora said Mac was good when he was covering the stuff he knew, cops and cop scandals, while other times he was clearly struggling,” he recalled. 
 
 Seeing those imperfections has helped him avoid turning McAlary into a classically uplifting Hanks role. Or, as he put it bluntly: “not to” screw “this up.” ||||| Few women I know actually met Nora Ephron. But most feel like we knew her. 
 
 Or more accurately, like she knew us. 
 
 Not because she was one of us, but because she was so much more, a distillation of what women felt but didn't yet know, or would have said if they'd been clever enough. The quips the rest of us wished we'd made, but didn't think of until the moment had passed? Ephron gave us voice. 
 
 She was our secrets, our snark, our doubts and our triumphs writ large. Rereading her words and re-watching her films today, you feel they were not so much created, but discovered -- moments in time, ways of looking at the world, changes in women and what they wanted from life, all waiting for Ephron to sum them up, just so. 
 
 She nailed what we wanted from love, and because of her, a generation has waited to hear some version of what Billy Crystal told Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally": "I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you, I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night." 
 
 She did the same for divorce, letting us live her revenge vicariously. When she caught her second husband, Carl Bernstein, cheating while she was pregnant with their second child, she wrote a roman a clef, "Heartburn," and, first on the page and then on the screen, she immortalized the man as one who was "capable of having sex with a Venetian blind." 
 
 She managed to celebrate romance and roast it at the same time -- which, when you think of it, is exactly what romance deserves. "When you're attracted to someone," she wrote in "Sleepless in Seattle," "it just means that your subconscious is attracted to their subconscious, subconsciously. So what we think of as fate is just two neuroses knowing that they are a perfect match." 
 
 She had children, and kept her sense of humor. "When your children are teenagers," she warned in "I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman," "it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you." 
 
 She got older, and became even funnier. "There's a reason why forty, fifty, and sixty don't look the way they used to," she quipped in "I Feel Bad About My Neck," "and it's not because of feminism, or better living through exercise. It's because of hair dye. In the 1950's only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and Los Angeles where there are no gray-haired women at all." 
 
 And oh what she did for sex. 
 
 The most famous scene in all of her movies -- perhaps in all of romantic comedy -- was the one in "When Harry Met Sally" where Meg Ryan's character fakes an orgasm in Katz's Deli -- a moment that still makes women smirk and makes men insecure. Sex is something to be celebrated, not apologized for, she told us. No pretending or game playing -- unless of course, that works for you. "In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind," she once said. 
 
 She toppled barriers -- starting as a mail girl at Newsweek because the magazine didn't hire female writers; writing screenplays because it allowed her to work from home when her children were small; becoming a director at a time when there were no women at the helm of big-budget feature films; writing bestsellers, and a Broadway show, and succeeding at each one. "Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim," she said in a 1996 speech to the graduating class of Wellesley College (from which she graduated in 1962). 
 
 But most of all, she opened doors. By putting the female experience on the screen and on the page, she made it visible, and worthy, and she elevated it to the level of art. She took "women's topics" -- romance, relationships, food, motherhood, clothes, hair, friendship, aging, looking young -- and declared that they were not only worthy of conversation, but they could draw at the box office, which is the only language Hollywood understands. 
 
 She laughed, loudly, at the thinking that women weren't supposed to be funny, and that they were supposed to stay quiet -- paving the way for Tina Fey and Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling and just about every woman who has made you chuckle lately. 
 
 In recent years, Ephron seems to have spent a lot of time looking back, writing often -- fleetingly, jokingly, but often -- about the end of a life. 
 
 In "I Feel Bad About My Neck": "...the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death." 
 
 In "I Remember Nothing": "I am old. I am sixty-nine years old. I'm not really old, of course. Really old is eighty. But if you are young, you would definitely think that I'm old." 
 
 In "Heartburn": "I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out." 
 
 It was a great read, Nora. ||||| Rick Huxley Bass player Rick Huxley, one of the founding members of the Dave Clark Five, died on Feb. 11, 2013, at the age of 72. Though the band broke up in 1970, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. 
 
 John Kerr John Kerr, the stage and film actor whose credits include the movie "South Pacific," the thriller "The Pit and the Pendulum" and a Tony Award-winning turn in "Tea and Sympathy," died on Feb. 9, 2013, at the age of 81. He passed away due to heart failure at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, Calif. 
 
 Donald Byrd Jazz musician Donald Byrd, a leading hard-bop trumpeter of the 1950s who collaborated on dozens of albums with top artists of his time and later enjoyed commercial success with hit jazz-funk fusion records such as "Black Byrd," died on Feb. 4, 2013. He was 80. No details have been released regarding his death. 
 
 Mark Balelo Mark Balelo, an auction house owner featured on the A&E reality TV show "Storage Wars," was found dead on Feb. 11, 2013. He was 40. His death has been declared a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/13/mark-balelo-suicide_n_2674485.html">suicide</a>. 
 
 Mary O'Connor O'Connor, Hugh Hefner's longtime secretary who appeared on the reality series "Girls Next Door," died on Jan. 27, 2013. 
 
 Robin Sachs The British actor died on Feb. 1, 2013, just four days shy of his 62nd birthday. He is best known for playing villainous character Ethan Rayne on the hit series "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," but boasts a full resume and will also be remembered for his roles on "Babylon 5" and "Star Trek: Voyager." 
 
 Robert F. Chew The actor, best known for his role as drug kingpin Proposition Joe on the critically acclaimed HBO series “The Wire,” died January 17th, 2013, of apparent heart failure in his sleep at his home in Northeast Baltimore. He was 52. 
 
 Freddy E Seattle rapper Freddy E (real name Freddy E. Buhl) died on January 5, 2013, of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. The 22-year-old is believed to have live tweeted the moments leading up to his apparent suicide. 
 
 Ned Wertimer Ned Wertimer (here seen on the left), who appeared on 11 seasons of "The Jeffersons" as Ralph The Doorman, died January 2, 2013, at the age of 89. Wertimer died following health complications at the Sherman Village Health Care Center in California. 
 
 Pauline Phillips Pauline Phillips, who as Dear Abby dispensed snappy, sometimes saucy advice to millions of newspaper readers around the world, died Jan. 16, 2013, in Minneapolis after a long battle with Alzheimer's. She was 94. 
 
 David R. Ellis Ellis, the director of "Snakes on a Plane," died in South Africa on January 7, 2013. He was 60. 
 
 Jenni Rivera In this March 8, 2012 file photo, Mexican-American singer and reality TV star Jenni Rivera poses during an interview in Los Angeles. Las Vegas-based Starwood Management, the company that owns the luxury jet that crashed and killed Rivera on Dec. 9, is under investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and the agency seized two of its planes earlier this year as part of the ongoing probe. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon, File) 
 
 Charles Durning The revered actor, who played everyone from a Nazi colonel to the pope to Dustin Hoffman's would-be suitor in "Tootsie," died of natural causes in New York on December 24, 2102, at the age of 89. 
 
 Nora Ephron Director, author, journalist, playwright, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nora-ephron/" target="_hplink">HuffPost blogger</a>, and three-time Academy Award nominated screenwriter, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/nora-ephron-dead-dies-age-71_n_1627757.html" target="_hplink">Nora Ephron passed away</a> on June 26 after a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/nora-ephron-leukemia-cancer-illness-death_n_1629152.html" target="_hplink">secret multi-year battle with acute myeloid leukemia</a>. With genre defining films like "Sleepless In Seattle", "You've Got Mail", and "When Harry Met Sally", Ephron, 71, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/26/nora-ephron-influence-movies_n_1628700.html?utm_hp_ref=entertainment" target="_hplink">left an indelible mark on the film industry.</a> 
 
 Herbert Lom Herbert Lom, best known as Inspector Clouseau's long-suffering boss in the "Pink Panther" movies, died peacefully in his sleep at home in London on Sept. 27, 2012. He was 95. 
 
 Michael Clarke Duncan "The Green Mile" actor Michael Clarke Duncan died at the age of 54 on Sept. 3, 2012 in a Los Angeles hospital after nearly two months of treatment following a July 13, 2012 heart attack. 
 
 Jerry Nelson "Sesame Street" puppeteer Jerry Nelson, shown here with "Sesame Street" character Count von Count in New York in June 2012, died at age 78 on Aug. 23, 2012, in Massachusetts after battling emphysema. 
 
 Conrad Bain The actor best known for his long run as father Philip Drummond on the hit series "Diff'rent Strokes," died on January 14, 2013, of natural causes in his hometown of Livermore, California. He was 89. 
 
 Phyllis Diller Actress/comedienne Phyllis Diller, who was best know for her stand-up act, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/20/phyllis-diller-dead_n_1812818.html">died at the age of 95</a> on Aug. 20. 2012 in Los Angeles. 
 
 Tony Scott Director Tony Scott, whose projects include "The Hunger," "Top Gun," "Enemy of the State," died after jumping off a bridge in Los Angeles on Aug. 19, 2012. 
 
 Scott McKenzie "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" singer Scott McKenzie, seen here in the center with "The Mamas And The Papas" 1967, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/20/scott-mckenzie-dead-dies-san-francisco-73_n_1809989.html">died on Aug. 18. 2012</a>, after battling Guillain-Barre Syndrome, a disease that affects the nervous system. 
 
 William Windom A 1980 file photo provided by CBS shows actor William Windom, who won an Emmy Award for his turn in the TV comedy series "My World And Welcome To It," died Aug. 16, 2012, of congestive heart failure at his home in Woodacre, north of San Francisco. He was 88. 
 
 Jack Klugman The "Off Couple" star died at peacefully in his California home at the age of 90, on Christmas Eve, 2012. In the 1980s, Klugman lost his voice to throat cancer and trained himself to speak again. 
 
 Ron Palillo This June 8, 2008 file photo shows actor Ron Palillo at the TV Land Awards in Santa Monica, Calif. Palillo, best known as the nerdy high schooler Arnold Horshack on "Welcome Back, Kotter," <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/14/ron-palillo-dead-dies-welcome-back-kotter-heart-attack_n_1776155.html">died Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2012</a>, in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., of an apparent heart attack. He was 63. 
 
 Lupe Ontiveros This Oct. 7, 2008 file photo shows actress Lupe Ontiveros at Padres Contra El Cancer's 8th annual "El Sueno de Esperanza" benefit gala in Los Angeles. Ontiveros, the popular Texan actress known for her portrayal of Yolanda Saldivar in "Selena," <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/27/lupe-ontiveros-dead-star-_n_1709783.html">died Thursday, July 26, 2012</a>, of cancer at the Presbyterian Hospital in the City of Whittier, Calif., according to friend and comedian Rick Najera. She was 69. 
 
 Sherman Hemsley In this Aug. 11, 1986 file photo, actor Sherman Hemsley poses for a photo in Los Angeles. The manager for Hemsley says the late star of the television sitcom "The Jeffersons" refused treatment for lung cancer in the weeks before he died of what a coroner says were complications from the disease on July 24, 2012. (AP photo/Nick Ut, File) 
 
 Frank Pierson In this Feb. 14, 2004 file photo, Academy President Frank Pierson arrives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Scientific and Technical Achievements Awards dinner in Pasadena Calif. Pierson's family announced that <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/frank-pierson-dead-dog-day-afternoon-dies_n_1696126.html">he died of natural causes on Monday, July 23, 2012</a> in Los Angeles after a short illness. He was 87. 
 
 Jon Lord Deep Purple's Jon Lord, seen here in 2004, died at age 71 on Monday, July 16, 2012, after battling pancreatic cancer. 
 
 Whitney Houston With perhaps one of the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/21/whitney-houston-celebrate-jordin-sparks-sparkle_n_1532870.html" target="_hplink">greatest voices</a> of her generation, Houston was a multi-Grammy winning singer and actress left an indelible mark on both the pop and R&B genres. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/15/whitney-houston-xanax_n_1279947.html" target="_hplink">Houston's well documented struggles with drug addiction</a> are thought to have contributed to her unexpected and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/11/whitney-houston-dead-sing_n_1270889.html" target="_hplink">untimely demise</a> at age 48 on <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/05/whitney-houston-death-report-last-day_n_1405206.html" target="_hplink">February 11</a>. 
 
 Kitty Wells This May 1986 file photo shows country music singer Kitty Wells in Nashville, Tenn. Wells, the first female superstar of country music, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/kitty-wells-dead-queen-of-country-dies_n_1677532.html">died at the age of 92 on Monday, July 16, 2012.</a> The singers family says Wells died at her home Monday after complications from a stroke. Her recording of "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" in 1952 was the first No. 1 hit by a woman soloist on the country music charts. Other hits included "Making Believe" and a version of "I Can't Stop Loving You." (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, file) 
 
 Donna Summer <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/18/donna-summer-queen-of-disco_n_1526799.html" target="_hplink">The Queen of Disco</a> lost her <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/17/donna-summer-dead-queen-of-disco-dies_n_1524410.html" target="_hplink"> battle with cancer</a> on May 17. Summer, 63, earned that title with dance hits like "Last Dance", "MacArthur Park", and "Hot Stuff". 
 
 Ernest Borgnine Perhaps best remembered for his<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/08/ernest-borgnine-movies-films_n_1657787.html" target="_hplink"> Oscar-winning performance in the film "Marty",</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/09/ernest-borgnine-dead-remembered_n_1658937.html" target="_hplink">Borgnine</a> continued to act until his death, voicing a character on "SpongeBob SquarePants" and earning an Emmy Nomination on the TV series "ER." He was 95 when he passed away on July 8 due to renal failure. 
 
 Andy Griffith <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/03/andy-griffith-dead_n_1645969.html" target="_hplink">Andy Griffith,</a> the star of beloved television programs "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Matlock", <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/05/andy-griffith-cause-of-death-heart-attack_n_1652599.html" target="_hplink">died of a heart attack</a> on Tuesday, July 3. He was 86. 
 
 Helen Gurley Brown In this Sept. 20, 1982 file photo, Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown poses during an interview at her office in New York. Brown, longtime editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, died on Aug. 13, 2012 at a hospital in New York after a brief hospitalization. She was 90. (AP Photo/Marty Lederhandler, File) 
 
 Don Grady <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/28/don-grady-my-three-sons-obituary_n_1633047.html" target="_hplink">The multi talented musician, composer, and actor</a> who memorably starred on the television series "My Three Sons" lost his battle with cancer on June 27. An original Mouseketeer, Grady was 68 he passed away. 
 
 Yvette Wilson Comedienne most famous for her hilarious roles on TV shows "Moesha" and "The Parkers", Wilson <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/15/yvette-wilson-star-of-moe_n_1600037.html" target="_hplink">lost her battle with cervical cancer</a> on June 14. She was 48. 
 
 Ann Rutherford This Nov. 5, 1971 file photo shows actress Ann Rutherford in New York. Rutherford, who played Scarlett O'Hara's sister Carreen in the 1939 movie classic "Gone With the Wind," <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/12/ann-rutherford-dead-gone-_n_1589753.html">died at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Monday, June 11, 2012</a>. She was 94. (AP Photo/HF) 
 
 Robin Gibb <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/23/barry-gibb-tribute-video-robin-gibb-bee-gees_n_1539954.html" target="_hplink">Co-founder of The Bee Gees</a>, Gibb was 62 when he <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/20/robin-gibb-dead-bee-gees_n_1531648.html" target="_hplink">lost</a> his battle with colon cancer on May 20. 
 
 Bob Welch From AP: Bob Welch, a former member of Fleetwood Mac who went on to write songs and record several hits during a solo career,<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/07/bob-welch-dead-fleetwood-mac-gunshot_n_1579166.html"> died June 7, 2012</a>, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, police said. He was 65. 
 
 Chuck Brown In this Feb. 13, 2011 file photo, Chuck Brown arrives at the 53rd annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Brown, who styled a unique brand of funk music as a singer, guitarist and songwriter known as the "godfather of go-go," <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/16/chuck-brown-dead-godfather_n_1522375.html">died Wednesday, May 16, 2012</a> after suffering from pneumonia. He was 75. 
 
 Mitchell Guist Mitchell Guist, who appeared in segments of the "Swamp People" with his brother, Glenn, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/14/mitchell-guist-dead-swamp-people_n_1515423.html">died after collapsing Monday, May 14, 2012</a> while working on a houseboat he was building on Belle River. 
 
 Adam Yauch Best known as one of the founding members of the<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/23/mca-ad-rock-adam-horovitz-beastie-boys-interview_n_1539705.html" target="_hplink"> trailblazing hip-hop group the Beastie Boys</a>, Yauch, also known by his stage name MCA, was also a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/04/adam-yauch-films_n_1478993.html" target="_hplink">film director</a> and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/04/adam-yauch-dead-tibet_n_1478359.html" target="_hplink">human rights activist</a>. At age 47, Yauch unfortunately lost his almost three year battle with cancer on May 4. 
 
 George Lindsey George Lindsey, seen here in character as Goober Pyle on "The Andy Griffith Show" in 1982,<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/06/george-lindsey-dead-andy-griffith-show-goober-pyle-dies-83_n_1490083.html"> died early Sunday, May 6, 2012.</a> He was 83. 
 
 Levon Helm In this May 15, 2010 photo, Levon Helm performs on the mandolin during a Ramble performance at Helm's barn in Woodstock, N.Y. Helm, who was in the final stages of his battle with cancer,<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/19/levon-helm-dead-the-band-cancer-battle_n_1434772.html"> died Thursday, April 19, 2012 in New York.</a> He was 71. He was a key member of The Band and lent his distinctive Southern voice to classics like "The Weight" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." 
 
 Dick Clark Radio personality, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/dick-clark-quotes_n_1435713.html" target="_hplink">TV host</a>, and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nelson-davis/dick-clarks-business-less_b_1466150.html" target="_hplink">beloved producer</a>, Dick Clark died of a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/18/dick-clark-heart-attack-death_n_1435551.html" target="_hplink">massive heart</a> attack on April 18. The host of classic programs such as <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20120418/us-dick-clark-highlights/" target="_hplink">American Bandstand</a> and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/19/dick-clarks-new-years-eve_n_1437040.html" target="_hplink">Dick Clark's Rocking New Years Eve was 82.</a> 
 
 Davy Jones Lead singer of hit 60's band <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/29/davy-jones-dead-monkees-moments-video_n_1310837.html" target="_hplink">The Monkees</a>, Jones' <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/01/monkees-davy-jones-obituary_n_1312799.html" target="_hplink">heartthrob status</a> was cemented with hits like "Day Dream Believer" and "I Wanna Be Free". He died at age 66 on February 29 after <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/05/davy-jones-autopsy-report_n_1406273.html" target="_hplink">suffering a heart attack</a>. 
 
 Don Cornelius <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/01/don-cornelius-dead-soul-train_n_1246642.html" target="_hplink">Cornelius</a>, creator and host of the long-running, groundbreaking<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/01/don-cornelius-dead-celeb-tweets_n_1247021.html" target="_hplink"> TV dance show "Soul Train,"</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/24/don-cornelius-autopsy-depression_n_1450184.html" target="_hplink">unfortunately committed suicide </a>Wednesday morning, Feb. 1. He was 75. 
 
 Ian Abercrombie In this Sept. 17, 2005 file photo, actor Ian Abercrombie is shown during the British Academy of Film and Television Arts/Los Angeles and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences third annual Emmy Nominees Tea Party in Los Angeles. Abercrombie, a veteran British stage and screen actor whose TV roles included Elaines boss Mr. Pitt on "Seinfeld" and Professor Crumbs on Wizards of Waverly Place,<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/28/ian-abercrombie-tv-moments_n_1239120.html"> died Thursday, Jan. 22, 2012</a> at a Los Angeles hospital from complications of kidney failure. He was 77. 
 
 Etta James The "At Last" crooner <a href="http://http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/20/etta-james-dead-legendary_n_1219083.html" target="_hplink">passed away</a> on January 20 due to complications from leukemia. James, also known as <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/22/etta-james-singers-passio_n_1222010.html" target="_hplink">The Matriarch of R&B</a>, was 73. 
 
 Andy Williams This Feb. 23, 1978 file photo shows performer and host Andy Williams at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Williams, who had a string of gold albums and hosted several variety shows and specials like "The Andy Williams Show," died Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012, at his home in Branson, Missouri, following a yearlong battle with bladder cancer, his Los Angeles-based publicist, Paul Shefrin, said Wednesday. He was 84. (AP Photo/Lennox McLendon, file)
– Filmmaker and writer Nora Ephron has died at age 71, reports TMZ. Ephron, who wrote the screenplays for Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, had "emerged over the past four decades as one of America's warmest and most acute chroniclers of contemporary culture," says the Washington Post in a photo tribute. But she was also, as People notes, "one of the most powerful figures in Hollywood." Other big titles include Silkwood, You've Got Mail, and Julie and Julia, not to mention her novel Heartburn and her best-selling 2006 collection of essays I Feel Bad About My Neck. Ephron died of complications from a blood disorder called myelodysplasia, which was diagnosed six years ago, reports the Post. (Its full obituary is here.) Salon: "Her cultural influence is so elemental ... she's like hydrogen." The site rounds up its interviews with her here. New York Times: "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 were and continue to be dominated by men." What's more, she was successful in all those things. Huffington Post: She "belonged to America's top tier of filmmakers, but her talents extended far beyond Hollywood."