Death of romcom star Nora Ephron a ‘tremendous loss’ Prayer no ‘cure’

LOS ANGELES: Writer, director and producer Nora Ephron, known for romantic comedies When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle and Julie and Julia, as well as books and essays, has died in New York after battling leukemia. She was 71.

Her publisher, Alfred Knopf, said: “She brought an awful lot of people a tremendous amount of joy. She will be sorely missed.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg issued a statement calling the loss “a devastating one” for the city’s arts and cultural community.

Ephron, who often parlayed her own love life into movies like Heartburn and gave her acerbic take on ageing in the 2010 essay collection, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, had kept her illness largely private except for close friends and family.

“At some point, your luck is going to run out… You are very aware with friends getting sick that it can end in a second,” Ephron said in a 2010 interview while promoting the book.

She urged her readers to make the most of their lives.

“You should eat delicious things while you can still eat them, go to wonderful places … and not have evenings where you say to yourself, ‘what am I doing here? Why am I here? I am bored witless!’,” she said.

Born on May 19, 1941, in New York City and raised in Beverly Hills by screenwriter parents, Ephron worked briefly as a White House intern before going into journalism.

She started in the entertainment industry while married to her second husband, The Washington Post’s famed Watergate investigative reporter Carl Bernstein.

Ephron was married three times and is survived by her husband of more than 20 years, writer Nicholas Pileggi, and two children with Bernstein. – Reuters MINNEAPOLIS: The president of a Christian ministry dedicated to helping people repress same-sex attraction through prayer is trying to distance the group from the idea that gay people’s sexual orientation can be permanently “cured”.

That’s a significant shift for Exodus International, the Orlando-based group that boasts 260 ministries around the US and the world.