Who

The woman behind When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle, screenwriter/director Nora Ephron is the queen of the 20th century rom-com. She's married to her third husband, Nick Pileggi.

Backstory

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Beverly Hills, Ephron is the daughter of screenwriting team Henry and Phoebe Ephron, who penned Carousel, Daddy Long Legs, and Desk Set. Nora attended Beverly Hills High before heading off to Wellesley, and spent part of her junior year interning at the Kennedy White House. When she graduated in 1962, she moved to New York and landed a job at the New York Post as a reporter. She spent several years at the paper, moving on to write for Esquire and New York in the '70s. Eventually, though, she obeyed her genetic inheritance and turned to screenwriting. In 1983 one of her first screenplays was turned into a Mike Nichols-directed film, Silkwood, and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay. Her first book, Heartburn, hit bookshelves the same year. A "confection of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast," the novel is a thinly-veiled account of her marriage to and divorce from Watergate sleuth Carl Bernstein, a man she described as "capable of having sex with a Venetian blind." Ephron later turned the novel into a screenplay. (Nichols directed, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep starred.) Then came Ephron's golden age: She wrote the script for the mega-blockbuster When Harry Met Sally in 1989, then as both a director and screenwriter turned out a bunch of box office successes including Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail.

Of note

The patron saint of the chick flick and a titan of New York-y romantic comedies, Ephron's box office magic failed to materialize in 2005, when she wrote and directed Bewitched with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. The movie was panned by critics ("Unrivaled in modern times for smugness, vapidity, and condescension," wrote the Voice) and didn't perform impressively at the box office either. Ephron earned better reviews a year later with her essay collection I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, her first book in 23 years. A postmenopausal rumination on getting older, the book went down well with her aging demo thanks to its descriptions of, among other indignities, the horrifying trauma of having to give up her $1,500-a-month, rent-controlled, eight-room apartment at the Apthorp on the Upper West Side.

Namedrop

Binky Urban is Ephron's literary agent. Her dermatologist and good friend is Pat Wexler. She's a pal of Arianna Huffington and contributes the occasional post to the Huffington Post. They also both once dated the same man, billionaire real estate developer/man of letters Mort Zuckerman. A fixture at movie premieres, Ephron has been close to Peggy Siegal for decades. She's also close to Woody Allen: She's had cameos in two of his movies, Husbands and Wives and Crimes and Misdemeanors. Regular dinner party guests include Binky and her husband, Ken Auletta, Al Franken, Sony chief Howard Stringer and Columbia Pictures chair Amy Pascal. Two of Nora's three sisters, Amy Ephron and Delia Ephron, are also writers and occasional collaborators.

Personal

Ephron married her third husband, Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the screenplays for Casino and Goodfellas, in 1987. Ephron's first marriage was to author Dan Greenberg, whom she described in Heartburn as a "low-grade lunatic." Her second marriage, to Carl Bernstein, produced two sons, Max and Jacob. (Jacob is the "Eye" editor at W and Women's Wear Daily; Max is a singer.) Ephron and Pileggi now live on the Upper East Side and also own a six-bedroom home in the Georgica Pond area of East Hampton, which they rented out for the summer of 2007 to Heather Mills for $200,000.

No joke

For years, Ephron was one of the few people who knew the identity of "Deep Throat."