 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. 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.  Nora Ephron is dead at 71. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
– 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."