You may have never heard of her before. But if you are a women between 25 and 60 you would have probably shed a tear during one of her movies. This is woman who got other women. Nora Ephron was Hollywood’s most influential woman writer/director (I was hard pressed to name another woman director), died yesterday in New York. She certainly had a life well lived. First married to Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post and Watergate fame, she wrote and directed Silkwood with Meryl Streep, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got out my Mail, and most recently Julie and Julia about the uber cool Julia Childs. She also wrote, produced and directed the definitive date movie of my generation “When Harry Met Sally” that forever answered the question “can men and women be friends?”
Nobody can forget the infamous faked orgasm scene done by Meg Ryan. It spawned thousand of bar contests (who can fake the best climax), and was so side splittingly funny because every woman had indeed faked an orgasm at one time or another. I asked my partner why there are so few women that have that level of success in the mass media. Ephron was incredibly talented and commercially lucrative who really got it and was ambitious enough to see the project to completion. To me she is one of the liberators of female sexuality by letting us laugh about our orgasms.
Hats off to you Nora Ephron, I’m going to fake a climax today in your honour.
