The films she directed (“When Harry met Sally,” “Sleepless in Seattle”) tugged at the heart’s strings but without that extra helping of gooey sentimentality so often noticeable at the fore nowadays. She was also an essayist and a playwright. Ephron, a N.Y.-L.A.-N.Y. transplant had been living in Manhattan at the time of her death. She suffered from pneumonia made unmanageable by an early form of leukemia.

[Steve Martin: She was the one you wanted to read, to listen to, to be in the company of. Nora Ephron. Incomparable wit; delightful friend. Sadness reigns (Twitter)]

In the sixties Ephron worked as a journalist, and wrote for the New  York Post. Later, she was assigned to write stories for Esquire and New York–an essayist, a humorist, Ephron commented popular culture with wit. New York, she’s one of us. Her involvement in cinema involved a couple of gigs as screenwriter at first; a few collaborations with Mike Nichols. Her greatest success, of course, came with the writing of “When Harry Met Sally,” with that certain scene at Katz’s Deli on Houston Street and something about “I’ll have what she’s having.”

[Bret Easton Ellis: I didn’t connect with everything Nora Ephron made but I met the woman numerous times and she was a lovely, funny, talented woman. Sadness… (Twitter)]

Ephron strikes me as a remarkable person who perhaps looked unkindly to much about our current era–and deservingly so. After all, she comes from the good American epoch, those Fifties and Sixties that us younger generations would have wanted to have grown up in. Nora Ephron was a rare American.

Although Jewish by birth, Ephron was not religious. “You can never have too much butter, that is my belief. If I have a religion, that’s it,” she said in an NPR interview in 2009. The last film she made was “Julie and Julia.”

[Diablo Cody: Very sad news about Nora Ephron. A graceful, hilarious writer and world-class filmmaker (Twitter)]