Norah Ehpron basically created the mould for modern day romantic comedies, writing both “When Harry Met Sally” and “Sleepless In Seattle.’ She passed away yesterday in Manhattan of complications relating to acute myeloid leukaemia.

Ephron was a a journalist, blogger, essayist, novelist, playwright, and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter and movie director, but perhaps most importantly, and key to all the rest, she was very very funny. Her publisher wrote in a statement that “She brought an awful lot of people a tremendous amount of joy, she will be sorely missed.”

Ephron was born on 19 May 1941 in New York, to a Broadway playwright and a Hollywood screenwriter. Her and the four sisters all became writers, obviously listening to their mother’s, the former Phoebe Wolkind, advice: “Everything is Copy”. Ephron was to use this advice well turning wry personal observations on relationships into hugely successful romantic comedies, essays for major US magazines, as well as several non-fiction books, including two recent memoirs.

Several years ago, Ms. Ephron learned that she had myelodysplastic syndrome, a pre-leukemic condition, but she kept the illness a secret from all but a few intimates and continued to lead a busy, sociable life.

“She had this thing about not wanting to whine,” the writer Sally Quinn said on Tuesday. “She didn’t like self-pity. It was always, you know, ‘Suck it up.’ ”

She was married three times, once to Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal. Their rather public separation ended up as a novel Heartburn, which Ephron turned into a movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.

Meryl Streep said in an email to the New York Times:

You could call on her for anything: doctors, restaurants, recipes, speeches, or just a few jokes, and we all did it, constantly,” she wrote in her e-mail. “She was an expert in all the departments of living well.

Ephron is survived by her husband and two sons.

[Source: New York Times]