Nora Ephron, the much loved and celebrated author and film-maker has died. She had contracted pneumonia brought on by the leukemia she had been battling for six years. She was 71.

Whether you loved her books, screenplays, stage plays, blogs, essays or the films she directed and produced, you will miss Norah Ephron. Every piece of her writing was filled with her casual wisdom, not sugared, but wry, acerbic and overwhelmingly honest.

Her characters ring so true that you can’t help but feel you already know them (and her). The dialogue, which she crafted, was consistently brilliant.

It didn’t just elevate her films to ‘classic’ status; little chunks of her screenplays actually inserted themselves into everyday language (except the original is always much, much funnier.)

Ephron dazzled in every form. She could also deliver these lines too. Check out her speech as she awards Meryl Streep with a lifetime achievement award (and recommends that everyone gets Meryl Streep to play them in a film of their life):

She broke through Hollywood’s glass ceilings , earning the well-deserved labels ‘queen of the rom com’ and ‘the multi-media Dorothy Parker.’

After creating a string of hit films including Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail and Julie and Julia, Ephron explained that the film-making business was still a struggle.

To movie studio heads she quipped, “a movie about a woman’s cure for cancer is less interesting than a movie about a man with a hangnail.” So she proved them wrong again and again.

The celebration of her work has already begun. A list of things she will and won’t miss (from the closing pages of her last book I Remember Nothing has already gone viral.

As has her advice to the young women graduates from Wellesley College. Bring on the Nora Ephron retrospectives and movie marathons. And maybe even a flash mob to recreate this scene from When Harry Met Sally:

Do you have a favourite line from one of her screenplays?  Post it in the comments if so…

Mekella Broomberg

(Image via Claudia Daggett)