Nora Ephron | featured news

Mr. Hanks is making his Broadway debut in “Lucky Guy,” written by his friend Nora Ephron... Tom Hanks swears. Not a blue streak, no, but it’s bracing to hear profanity from the man who has defined decency for three decades in Hollywood, playing white knights in “Splash,” “Forrest Gump,” “Apollo 13” and the “Toy Story” series. If he is grandma-friendly on screen, he is looser and less predictable in person — as his old friend Nora Ephron was reminded several years ago when she sent him the screenplay for a biopic, “Lucky Guy.” Mr. Hanks took an instant dislike to his character, Mike McAlary, the muckraking columnist of New York City tabloids in the 1980s and ’90s.

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71.

Novelist and screenwriter Nora Ephron once wrote, "When you have a baby, you set off an explosion in your marriage, and when the dust settles, your marriage is different from what it was."