Celebrated screenwriter Nora Ephron passed away on Tuesday night in Manhattan after a battle with leukemia. She was 71.
Hollywood colleagues and devoted audiences have taken to the web this week, posting remembrances and tributes to the scribe who paved the way for creative females in Tinseltown and beyond. As Ephron told a crowd of ambitious young women at Wellesley College during a 1996 commencement address, women in her generation weren't expected to do much of anything.
Evidently, that wasn't an option for Ephron. She was a director, journalist, blogger, novelist, playwright and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. Her films, essays and novels each approached love -- and more often than not, all of its repercussions -- with a deft and brutally honest eye.
And while honesty alone does not a winning writer make, Ephron coupled her raw observations with a charming wit than won over movie audiences just as it won over devoted readers of The New Yorker. With plenty to go around, Ephron also wrote for The Huffington Post, where she notably penned the tagline to the Divorce section: "Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever."
Thrice married, Ephron was all-too-familiar with divorce, and was among the first in Hollywood to throw a women's perspective on the matter into her movies. In 1986, Heartburn cast a semi-autobiographical light on Ephron's divorce from Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. She later took up issues of single parenting in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and the sticky situations divorcees might find themselves in when seeking new love online in You've Got Mail (1998).