You will feel much better.'Ĭookie (1989), co-written by Ephron and Arlen, was not much of a success. If your husband is cheating on you with a carhop, get Meryl to play you. Nevertheless, Ephron commented: 'I highly recommend having Meryl Streep play you. Despite Ephron having written the screenplay of the film, it lacked the caustic humour and subtle asides of the book, becoming too sour. The publication resulted in Bernstein getting a court order to prevent Ephron from writing again about him or their two children. It was based on Ephron's 1983 novel of the same name, a thinly disguised tragicomic chronicle of her marriage to Bernstein, which ended in 1980, after he had an affair. Streep starred, as Ephron's alter ego, in Heartburn (1986), also directed by Nichols, which charts the breakdown of a marriage destroyed by the infidelity of the husband (Jack Nicholson). Something of a comeback for Nichols, who had not made a film for seven years, it concentrated on the daily life of its blue-collar heroine, finely portrayed by Meryl Streep as a small-town, chain-smoking Texan. She had to wait until 1983 for her first feature film, when her friend Mike Nichols asked her to write the screenplay (with Alice Arlen) for Silkwood, based on the life of Karen Silkwood, who died in suspicious circumstances while investigating abuses at a plutonium plant where she had worked. The script was dropped in favour of one by William Goldman, but Ephron got a taste for screenwriting.Īlthough she had already co-written a story with Greenburg for an episode of the television series Adam's Rib in 1973, a spin-off from the Tracy/Hepburn classic, her first solo effort was the script for a TV movie called Perfect Gentlemen (1978), starring Lauren Bacall. The couple turned in a script for All the President's Men, the movie based on Watergate, which, according to Robert Redford, who was to be cast as Bernstein's colleague Bob Woodward, showed Bernstein 'as the great lover hopping in and out of bed' and made Woodward appear dull.

In 1975 she met Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter famed for his part in exposing the Watergate scandal, and they married the following year. She wrote about her love for cooking, New York and sex, in that order, putting a satirical slant on each subject. By then married to the writer Dan Greenburg, she made a name for herself on the Post, as well as Esquire and the New York Magazine, as the smartest journalist around, inviting comparisons with the humorist Dorothy Parker. She became interested in journalism at an early age, and wrote for the university newspaper at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, from which she graduated with a political science degree in 1962.Īfter working in the postroom of Newsweek in New York, and writing for a satirical magazine, Ephron was taken on as a columnist on the New York Post. But, on the whole, her journalism was much tougher and funnier than the films, with Hollywood, as it usually does, managing to smooth out the sharp edges.Įphron was born in Manhattan but brought up in Beverly Hills, California, the eldest of four daughters (her sisters, Delia, Hallie and Amy, all became writers too).

Although she created strong female characters after her own image, they were never strident or domineering. Later, Ephron would take elements from her own life and fashion them into screenplays that would typify the genre that became known as the romcom. It was turned into a film two years later, with Sandra Dee in the role of the teenager. Ephron's parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, were also writers of romantic comedies – including Desk Set (1957) for Hepburn and Tracy – who based a 1961 Broadway play, Take Her She's Mine, on their daughter's rebellious college days.

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