Nancy Meyers - Early Life

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.