You've Got Mail 's Delia Ephron Reveals She Also Fell in Love Via Email –– Just Like Her Film
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Screenwriter Delia Ephron says she found love again thanks to an unexpected email.
Ephron — who co-wrote the classic rom-com, You've Got Mail, with her sister, late screenwriter Nora Ephron — received an email from a former flame after writing a New York Times essay about the death of her husband, Jerry Kass, in 2015.
The message was from Peter Rutter, who Ephron briefly dated when she was a teenager.
"We still can't agree on how many dates we had because I don't remember it at all, but I think it was two dates, but it might have been three," the 77-year-old recalled in a recent episode of Making Space with Hoda Kotb. "Fifty-four years before, when I was 18 years old, and my sister Nora had fixed us up."
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"So I got this very, very charming email from Peter, who was a psychiatrist, a Jungian analyst living in the Bay Area," she told Hoda Kotb of her now-husband. "And he said, 'You know, we had a couple of dates. It's just the most — was the most charming note. It was lovely. … So I wrote him back."
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Ephron said she and Rutter fell in love after exchanging messages, and soon, they were sharing conversations on the phone.
"It was amazing, and we began talking on the phone for hours," she said on the podcast.
Coincidentally, the romance shares parallels to You've Got Mail, where characters Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) spark a romance over instant messages and emails.
But soon after Ephron and Rutter began their relationship, they were hit with devastating news.
"Four months after I fell in love, I got leukemia," Ephron, who recently penned a memoir called Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, told NPR.
"[Rutter] proposed that weekend," she recalled. "On Monday, we went and got a license and we bought a ring, and on Tuesday, I checked into the hospital for my first chemo."
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Ephron has since beaten the disease after undergoing treatment and a bone marrow transplant, NPR reported. She and Rutter are still married today.
"Peter says we were not meant to be together when we were young," she said on Making Space with Hoda Kotb. "And that we met when we did. For some, we were — were meant to meet."
