Nora Ephron and Carrie Fisher: Did they know each other?

Ephron was homophobic.

They almost certainly knew each other, having grown up in the same circle and having worked together on a few pictures over the years.

Considering how low-key cunty they both were to most people, it's hard to guess if they were good friends or saucy rivals/frenemies. The genius and frustration of women like Carrie Fisher, Nora Ephron, Kim Cattrall, Debra Winger, and a few others is that they were always "on." They were always sharp-tongued, tired, and bitchy, even with their friends.

Beverly D'Angelo claims to have been best friends with Carrie Fisher, bonding over mutual exes and their sloppy careers.

R1

Does her son know?

Her son is not Zac Efron, r3.

The Ephron sisters were talentless hacks who made unfunny shit movies.

Unless you are being funny, her son Jacob Bernstein, a writer, is gay.

R5 The only saving grace of that movie was Madeline Kahn. But she stole every film she ever made.

Nora Ephron helped write When Harry Met Sally, which Carrie Fisher co-starred in as the best friend, so they had to have met through that, at least.

Carrie’s character has a lot of very Nora lines, my favorite being: “the right man for you might be out there right now, and if you don’t grab him, someone else will, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life knowing someone else is married to YOUR husband!”

“She [Ephron] was f–in’ alert; she was on her game. She was on mine, too; she was on everybody’s game. She was alert to everything you were saying and what you weren’t saying. She believed in herself. She knew what was funny. She knew the bottom line of stuff. Her writing was clear; there was no gristle. She wasn’t really fun, like, ‘Let’s go, Skippy.’ She was someone who said what she meant. That’s fun for me but not everybody. It’s exhausting. But you’d want to meet her in a restaurant in New York, and when she’d speak with you, you’d lean in like it was a fire, to warm yourself by the fire of her personality.” — Carrie Fisher

R9 Meanwhile, the rest of us learned early on never to "lean in" when YOU were speaking, unless we wanted to be sprayed with B-52 droplets and bits of Percodan!

Carrie Fisher was in Nora Ephron's directorial debut This is My Life with Julie Kavner and Samantha Mathis.

Nora didn’t exactly spend her life feeding the poor. She mostly just lived a bougie life and complained about things. Her whole schtick is dated.

She was the definition of bougie, but I still find her writing hilarious. The recipes she included in Heartburn are also excellent. Post-coital spaghetti carbonara is just perfect.

Who cares if it was bougie? Talented writers can find the comedy in almost anything. Ephron had her niche and she was very successful at it.

Bravo to OP - this is a fresh take on these subjects that I don't recall ever seeing before.

I was thinking they could have had a bit of professional competitiveness. Both were great writers. I know Carrie was more of a "script doctor".

Was Carrie known for being competitive with anyone? Even as a coke whore, she wasn't comptetitive with John Belushi.

Thanks for reminding me that they worked together.

R13, do you happen to have a link? I got a copy of Heartburn to browse through but there are no recipes, and I can't find anyone online who has posted it, either.

R18, this question sent me on a deep dive a few years back. Spaghetti carbonara isn’t one of the recipes featured in the book, but it’s mentioned and shown (memorably) in the film. What I could find through Google at the time was that Nora was partial to Marcella Hazan’s recipe for carbonara - which I highly recommend. It’s a little unusual because she has you deglaze the pork with white wine, but it makes the dish superb.

Yes, we know each other.

Thank you r19, I really appreciate it. The carbonara wasn't in the recipe index at the back of the book so I thought maybe Nora had talked about it in an interview or something and I just couldn't find it. I'm going to try Marcella's recipe this weekend!

Enjoy! Get ready to whip those egg yolks with the hot pasta!

When Streep was honored by the AFI, they both talked about being played by her onscreen.

Here's Ephron.

And here's Fisher/

R8 that’s my favorite Carrie Fisher role. Love that movie.

A DL poster, in another thread, mentioned "I Remember Nothing." I just borrowed the audio book from the library and, so far, really enjoying it.

Don't let the beginning part of the book put you off. (Beginning part sounds like she's going to talk about her fall into Alzheimer's.) She actually seems to remember quite a bit. Not sure if she had journals to work from.

She died in 2012, so, some of it is dated. However, she's complaining about all kinds of petty things, like what's done on DL.