MIRACLES DON’T JUST HAPPEN IN MOVIES

After losing her beloved sister Nora and husband Jerry to cancer, romcom writer DELIA EPHRON wasn’t expecting a Hollywood happy ever after. But then came a twist worthy of one of her famous films, as Julia Llewellyn Smith discovers

When Delia Ephron went on her second date with her now husband Peter Rutter, she was paralysed with nerves. Their first meeting, in a restaurant the night before, had gone swimmingly and ended in a kiss. Yet now, as the pair sat on a

New York park bench, she was realising that – after both being widowed in their

70s – they might unexpectedly have a second chance at love.

‘I started panicking,’ says Delia, 77, smiling wryly, recalling that day five years ago.

‘There had been a lot of emails and phone calls leading up to this and now I thought, “You know what? We’re going to fall in love but then one of us is going to die.” I said, “If I get sick, I give you permission to leave me.” Peter replied, “I could never leave you.”’

‘I was being funny, but not totally, because we’d just been through hell,’ Delia continues. ‘We both had been married to people who’d had long cancer deaths. I’d had so much loss and worry in my life. Falling in love when you’re older is wonderful, but there are trade-offs: death is right there around you.

You can reach out and touch it, and there’s a little bit of wanting to defy it by trying to get every single thing you can out of every day. Then, sure enough, four months later I got leukaemia.’

Now Delia, author and screenwriter of the acclaimed Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan romcom

You’ve Got Mail, has written a memoir of the past turbulent decade. Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, like much of her work, is both achingly romantic and a five-hanky weepie. ‘There’ve been unbelievable highs, unbelievable lows,’ she says.

The lows began in 2012 when leukaemia claimed her beloved sister Nora, who was three years her senior and the writer of the immortal films When Harry Met Sally... and

Sleepless in Seattle.

‘Nora and I had been so close since childhood. She was quite bossy and I wanted to do everything she did, though she was going around the track so fast, I couldn’t keep up. As we grew older, I began to try to differentiate from her, but we collaborated on so much together, she always said we shared a brain. We were very connected.’

As Nora’s illness worsened, Delia’s husband of 30 years Jerome Kass (who was also a writer) was diagnosed with prostate cancer. ‘I despaired. I was going to lose the two people I was closest to in the world.’ Three years after Nora, Jerry died.

‘Everything was different, everything was scattered,’ says Delia, sitting in the office of her apartment in New York’s ultra-fashionable Greenwich Village. ‘But I simply didn’t have a fantasy that I was going to meet somebody new. I had lots of friends and I was still busy writing. But I think if you’ve already had a wonderful marriage then you may be more open to allowing something else wonderful to happen.’

Sure enough, what then followed could have been a twist straight out of an

Ephron sisters movie. After Delia published an article complaining about the Kafkaesque experience she’d had with her phone provider trying to disconnect Jerry’s landline, she received an email from Peter.

A psychiatrist based in California, he empathised with her over the bureaucratic nightmare she’d faced and reminded her that the pair of them had met 54 years previously. They were both 18, on a date arranged by Nora, who was then working in a magazine office where Peter had been an intern. ‘I have a vague memory of going to a football game in the snow but I can’t