Sleepless in Seattle writer Nora Ephron dead at 71

(Adriana M. Bar)

Nora Ephron, a prolific writer- turned-Hollywood-hit-machine, died yesterday at 71.

The former New York Post reporter, who used her Big Apple hometown as the backdrop for hits like “When Harry Met Sally” and “You’ve Got Mail,” had fought advanced-stage leukemia, according to people close to her.

READ NORA EPHRON’S 1989 POST STORY ON STEINBRENNER ‘THE BOSS TALKS UP A STORM’ (PDF)

“She knew about it for a few years,” said a source — even though the public was unaware. “Treatment was not working. She wasn’t going to get better.”

Ephron spent her final days at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, surrounded by friends and family.

She is survived by her third husband, writer Nicholas Pileggi, and two sons from a previous marriage to journalist Carl Bernstein.

Mayor Bloomberg was among those payng tribute. “Nora always loved a good New York story, and she could tell them like no one else,” he said.

Celebrities flooded Twitter.

“RIP Nora Ephron,” wrote fellow director Ron Howard. “Brilliant, gracious and funny!”

“A witty, charming, lovely person,” wrote comic Albert Brooks.

“A great and prolific writer,” tweeted actress Sarah Silverman. “A warm and kind soul.”

A memorial luncheon is being planned by Ephron’s closest friends, including Barbara Walters.

Ephron was born in Manhattan, moved to Beverly Hills at 4, and returned in the 1960s. She won her job at The Post by writing a parody of the paper that impressed publisher Dorothy Schiff, and stayed on for five years.

She got her first taste of Hollywood when she helped Bernstein pen a screenplay draft for “All the President’s Men.”

It was based on the book he and Bob Woodward about the Watergate scandal they had covered for The Washington Post.

Her draft was scrapped, but her talent was noticed.

It was the drama “Silkwood,” starring Meryl Streep, in 1984 that cemented her celluloid success with an Oscar nomination.

Two years later, her semiautobiographical novel about her rocky marriage to Bernstein was made into the film “Heartburn,” starring Streep and Jack Nicholson.

Her film hits kept rolling in, with the Oscar-nominated “When Harry Met Sally” in 1989, starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.

Ryan would go on to be somewhat of a muse for Ephron, playing her lonely-heart women.

Ephron won an Oscar for 1993’s “Sleepless in Seattle,” starring Ryan and Tom Hanks — a film that pointedly ended happily ever after atop the Empire State Building. She wrote and directed the film.

The movie was such a hit that Ryan and Hanks were recast in Ephron’s 1998 Manhattan-set “You’ve Got Mail,” which she also wrote and directed.

Her play “Love, Loss and What I Wore” — written with sister and frequent collaborator Delia Ephron — has been performing off-Broadway for the past three years. Her final film, “Julie & Julia,” was released in 2009.

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