A movie producer, in 1973 Phillips was the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Picture (The Sting). She also co-produced a number of other major hits, including Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
She had a difficult time getting Taxi Driver made. “We couldn’t get the green light,” said a fellow producer. “I remember her being enormously pregnant, wearing a circle dress, standing up and saying, ‘I’m going to drop this baby right now if we don’t get this green light.’ The men got very nervous.” And the picture not only got made, it won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
Not everyone liked her style, however. Spielberg “essentially kicked her off” the Close Encounters set, a friend says. “It pretty much ended her career.” She didn’t let that stop her. “You always have to pay your dues,” she once said. But “I paid them backward — starting at the top and going to the bottom.”
In 1990 her autobiography You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again * demonstrated her mantra: “No rules.” She knew it would make enemies. “I didn’t write the book to get back in the business,” she said. “I had to accept the fact that I wasn’t in the business before I wrote the book.” Phillips died at home January 1 from cancer. She was 57.