Henry Ephron; Producer, Half of Film Writing Duo

Henry Ephron, half of the glamorous husband-wife writing team that brought “Carousel,” “Desk Set,” “Take Her, She’s Mine,” and the Oscar-nominated “Captain Newman, M.D.” to the screen, died Sunday. He was 81.

Ephron, who died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills, also produced films, among them “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” “23 Paces to Baker Street” and “Carousel,” which he and his wife and writing partner, Phoebe, adapted for film from the Broadway production.

He began his Broadway career as stage manager for George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s “The American Way” and “George Washington Slept Here.” In 1943, the Ephrons began their writing collaboration with “Three’s a Family,” a play celebrating the birth of their first daughter. It was produced on Broadway and ran for a year.

Another Broadway credit was 1961’s “Take Her, She’s Mine,” which was directed by the legendary George S. Abbott and starred Art Carney and Elizabeth Ashley. The Ephrons wrote the 1963 film version of the stage production. Their final Broadway play, “My Daughter, Your Son,” was staged in 1969.

The Ephrons came to California in 1946 and eventually worked for 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. studios, where they were “certainly part of that high-voltage Hollywood that just doesn’t exist anymore,” said film critic Sheila Benson, whose mother--a longtime president of the Screen Writers Guild--knew the couple well.

“The whole edge of the Ephrons was their dialogue, and the witty edge to it,” Benson said.

That talent was apparent in films such as the bright and sprightly Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy vehicle “Desk Set,” and in “Daddy Long Legs,” starring Fred Astaire. Other film credits of the couple include “What Price Glory?” with James Cagney, “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “John Loves Mary,” “The Jackpot,” starring Jimmy Stewart, and “Captain Newman, M.D.,” nominated in 1963 for an Academy Award.

Ephron produced and directed the 1958 film “Sing, Boy, Sing.”

After his wife’s death in 1971, he wrote a memoir, “We Thought We Could Do Anything.”

He is survived by four daughters and seven grandchildren. Three of his four daughters are writers; the eldest, essayist and screenwriter Nora Ephron, is directing her second film. She and her sister Delia--also a writer, whose books include “How to Eat Like a Child”--co-wrote the screenplay for Nora Ephron’s directorial debut, “This Is My Life.”

Amy Ephron has written several novels.

“The business is of course different now from when my parents were in it,” Nora Ephron said Sunday. “It crossed my mind when I started writing screenplays and not getting them made, what an extraordinary achievement it was to have the number of credits they had. I figured if I kept writing screenplays (and seeing them produced) at the rate I had been, I’d have to live to 140 to get the number of credits they did.”

A memorial service was being planned. The family said contributions may be made to the Motion Picture and Television Fund in Woodland Hills.