JULIA PHILLIPS: The film producer and writer Julia Phillips, who died on January 1st aged 57, was the first woman to receive an Oscar for best picture - an award she shared for producing The Sting (1973) with her husband Michael, and former actor Tony Bill. This was one of several enormously successful films with which she was associated, including Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976) and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (1977).
Nearly 30 years after the event, her breakthrough may seem a modest achievement, but she was, in fact, one of the very few women to break into the upper echelons of film-making in a town created by tough studio bosses, all of whom were ruthless and chauvinistic. Figures such as Ida Lupino, who had earlier emerged as a producer-director, were rare, and were usually relegated to modest budget films.
Sadly, despite her triumphs, Julia Phillips became increasingly addicted to drugs and alcohol. They ruined her credibility in Hollywood and, when she found herself an outcast, she took belated revenge by writing two memoirs, the first of which, You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town (1991), contained some of the most vicious comments ever published about tinseltown.
The book helped redefine the nature of Hollywood autobiographies with its insider's chronicle of petty indiscretions and vindictiveness among the town's top echelons. She not only named names, she also offered sometimes harsh personal judgments of former friends in high places in the film business. In an image-conscious industry, her candor was not appreciated; the book alienated many among the industry's elite - some of whom indeed never spoke to her again, at lunch or otherwise.
Spielberg, she wrote, was a "selfish, egomaniacal and greedy nerd"; Goldie Hawn "borderline dirty with stringy hair"; Warren Beatty, she alleged, had suggested a threesome with her and her 14-year-old daughter; the producer Larry Gordon was a "loudmouth"; Joel Silver a "fat slob". The writer Erica Jong resembled "Miss Piggy when her face is in repose".
Friends and family said she was stunned at the reaction to what she considered her honesty and spent much of her remaining life in retreat. Still, they said, she would not have changed a word. "You always have to pay your dues," she once told a reporter. "I paid them backwards - starting at the top and going to the bottom."
She admitted that her cocktail for surviving the Oscars night had been, "a diet pill, a small amount of coke, two joints, three valium and a glass-and-a-half of wine". She also claimed that her male colleagues despised her success and addiction equally. They hated the fact that she would not kowtow to their power, and that, by behaving badly with drugs and alcohol, she failed to show gratitude for her success.
Julia Phillips was born into a middle-class Jewish family in New York and, after graduating from Mt Holyoke College, worked on magazines, before entering films as a story editor at Paramount studios. She subsequently became head of production for the Mirisch Corporation, then a production executive at First Artists.
In 1966, she married Michael Phillips, and they joined forces with Tony Bill to produce films, their first joint venture being the off-beat comedy Steelyard Blues (1973), which attacked the American establishment and enjoyed modest success. Moving on to bigger projects, Bill/Phillips Productions joined George Roy Hill to produce The Sting, which won a total of seven Oscars, including best director and, significantly for Julia Phillips, best picture.
After The Sting, she and her husband produced Taxi Driver. Infinitely superior to their previous production, it failed to win any Oscars, but received the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and established itself as an iconic work of the 1970s.
Julia Phillips acted as executive producer on the spoof disaster film The Big Bus (1976), a modest venture compared with the $20 million production of Spielberg's Close Encounters - another work established as a classic of its genre. But by the time of that film, she was heavily addicted to cocaine and, despite having earned millions of dollars, found that her dependency was eroding her fortune. She later went into rehabilitation, but found it impossible to rescue her career.
She was executive producer on The Boost (1988), but received no credit. The same year, she produced The Beat for director Harold Becker. With some irony, this was a confusing, anti-drugs film, starring James Woods as a salesman who becomes addicted to cocaine and ends up ruined socially and financially. It was Julia Phillips's last work in the cinema.
Her vitriolic book became a bestseller but found few admirers among the Hollywood elite. In 1995, Julia Phillips published Driving Under The Affluence, an even more frantic and dismissive work that had less impact.
Her marriage ended in divorce; she is survived by her daughter.
Julia Phillips: born 1944; died, January 2002