Julia Phillips
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Julia Phillips, née Miller | |
---|---|
Born | April 7, 1944 New York City |
Died | January 1, 2002 West Hollywood, California |
Occupation | Film producer, Author |
Spouse | Michael Phillips 1966 - 1974 |
Children | Kate Phillips |
Julia Phillips (April 7, 1944 – January 1, 2002) was an Academy Award-winning film producer and author.
Born Julia Miller in New York City, she received her B.A. in Political Science from Mount Holyoke College in 1965.
In 1974, The Sting won the Academy Award for Best Picture and made Phillips the first woman to win an Oscar as a producer (an award shared by Tony Bill and Phillips' then-husband Michael Phillips.) In 1977, Taxi Driver (produced by Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips) was nominated for Best Picture. After her third major film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (produced with Michael Phillips and associate producer Clark Paylow), François Truffaut publicly criticised Phillips as incompetent -- a charge that she emphatically rejected, pointing out that she had essentially nursed Truffaut through a nightmare of sickness and chaos during the shoot in India.[1] Phillips was also a notorious drug user and abuser (cocaine especially), which she herself chronicled in detail in her memoirs.
In 1991 Phillips wrote a no-holds-barred autobiography about her experiences in Hollywood titled You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again. The book topped the New York Times bestseller list but its revelations about high-profile film personalities and Hollywood's casting couch mentality made her one of the most despised people in the film industry. In 1995, she followed up her story with a second book, Driving Under the Affluence, which is mostly about the impact her first book's reception had on her life.
Julia Phillips died in West Hollywood, California, at the age of 57, from cancer on New Years Day, 2002, and was interred in the Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.
[edit] Select filmography
- The Sting (1973)
- Taxi Driver (1976)
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
[edit] Footnotes
- ^ You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again by JP; Random House, 1991, p 274 et seq.