Skip to main content

‘All her movies are nonfiction’: remembering the life and work of Nora Ephron

In an expansive new biography, the acclaimed writer and director’s complexities are explored and contextualised

You can’t chart the whole of Nora Ephron with just the name-making hits that placed her atop the end-of-the-century romcom boom, but you can’t do so without them, either. The polymath writer’s best-known traits – her barbed wit, her particular taste mistaken by some for pickiness, her profound and enduring love of food – course through scripting gigs like When Harry Met Sally … as well as such directorial projects as Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail. Lovelorn and loquacious, this is the Nora fans feel they know well enough to assume the first-name basis, a characterization that only covers one side of a many-splendored woman. Kristin Marguerite Doidge, the author of the newly released Nora Ephron: A Biography, hopes to expand the image of a singular talent for the blinker-visioned faithful and uninitiated alike.

“She wrote for five or six decades, and so everyone comes to her from a different angle,” Doidge tells the Guardian from her home in Los Angeles. “Some people might have seen Heartburn before anything else, or maybe you remember seeing This Is My Life with your grandma. Some people find her much later, when she was feeling bad about her neck. The general public tends to think of her as the romantic comedy queen, the lady who did You’ve Got Mail. That’s just one part of her, and what she stands for. A lot of the younger generation doesn’t even know Nora and her movies. I teach at a university, and when I say her name, I get a lot of blank stares. It’s crazy!”

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/rmGj3Yx
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Rico Lewis helped harden up Manchester City’s treble challenge | Jamie Jackson

Guardiola believes advent of the teenage talent sowed seeds of change that turned his side into champions again Mid-January, the Etihad Campus. Before Tottenham’s visit a discontented Pep Guardiola is addressing a Manchester City team meeting that includes Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne, John Stones and Ederson. The champions are in second place, eight points behind Arsenal, each having played 18 games. Performances have dipped and so has the attitude of his players. The final match before the World Cup was a 2-1 home defeat by Brentford . Since the tournament, City have beaten Leeds and Chelsea, drawn with Everton and lost their previous outing , 2-1 at Manchester United. Seven points from 15 is not championship-defending form and, when being knocked out of the Carabao Cup by Southampton is factored in, Guardiola can see City’s campaign derailing. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/h8WjbMX
Post a Comment
Read more

Wandsworth escape accused says it was ‘foolish’ to jail him with his ‘skill set’

Daniel Khalife, 23, says he absconded because he was ‘terrified’ of being locked up with dangerous offenders A former British soldier has told a jury he did not hand himself in after he escaped from prison because he was “finally demonstrating what a foolish idea it was” to imprison someone with his “skill set”. Daniel Khalife, 23, told the court he absconded from Wandsworth prison while on remand because he was “terrified” of being locked up with “serious sex offenders” and “terrorists” who wanted to kill him, and that he did not think his imprisonment would be in the public interest. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/vRZHkaw
Post a Comment
Read more

The Green Planet review – David Attenborough’s gobsmacking, awe-inspiring return

From glowing bioluminescent fungus to 7,000 different camera set-ups for ants, the veteran broadcaster’s miraculous profile of plant life will have you gasping in astonishment so often you’ll be breathless One of the televisual joys I most remember from childhood was when a programme – often a nature documentary, but sometimes a few seconds on Sesame Street or a Tomorrow’s World demonstration of new technology – would show a flower unfolding with time-lapse photography. It was always sudden, always fleeting, and of course there weren’t even any recording buttons – let alone live pausing and rewinding facilities – that you could quickly press in order to capture and relive the delight. It was ever ephemeral, and I could never get enough. Until now, with the latest gift from David Attenborough and his endlessly patient and dedicated team of camera operators (to whom a now traditional 10-minute coda is again devoted), The Green Planet (BBC One). The new five-part series presented by the...
Post a Comment
Read more