Early Life
Meyers was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The younger of two daughters, she was raised in a Jewish household in the Drexel Hill area, a largely Catholic neighborhood. Her father, Irving, worked as an executive at a voting machines manufacturer, while her mother, Patricia (née Lemisch), was a homemaker and volunteer, who was also engaged in the Head Start Program and the Home for the Blind. After reading the Moss Hart biography Act One at the age of twelve, Meyers became interested in theater and started to act in local stage productions. Her interest in screenwriting did not emerge until she saw Mike Nichols' film The Graduate in 1967.
In 1972, after graduating from American University in Washington, D.C. with a degree in journalism and spending a year working in public television in Philadelphia, Meyers moved to her sister Sally's in Los Angeles, California to try her luck in Hollywood. Without any connections, she landed a job as a production assistant on the CBS game show The Price Is Right three days after her arrival. Two years later, Meyers quit the job to focus on a career in screenwriting and took film-making classes where she connected with directors such as Martin Scorsese. To support herself, she started a small cheesecake business after seeing the reactions to a cake she made for a dinner party. She was eventually hired as a story editor by film producer Ray Stark, who later fired her after she objected to the fact that two writers were working on the same script without the other knowing.
Read more about this topic: Nancy Meyers
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“An early dew woos the half-opened flowers”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)