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 1973, 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. Phillips was also a notorious drug user and abuser (cocaine especially), which she herself chronicled in detail in her memoirs.
In 1991 Phillips wrote the no-holds-barred autobiography You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again about her experiences in Hollywood . 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. In 2000, she also helped Matt Drudge write his Drudge Manifesto.
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.
In her book about Hollywood, "You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again," she wrote that actor Warren Beatty asked her in the mid 1980s if she wanted to have a threesome with him and her twelve-year-old daughter. Julia replied, "Warren, we're both too old for you.".
Julia Phillips was the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Picture (for Sting, The (1973) in 1974). She was the only female winner until 1989, when she was joined by Lili Fini Zanuck (who won for Driving Miss Daisy (1989)).
Born in Manhattan, she later grew up in Brooklyn, New York, Great Neck, NY and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Suffers from fear of flying
Daughter, Kate.
brother, Matthew Miller.
Her father was a scientist who worked on the Los Alamos project that developed the atomic bomb.
Graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.
1st female producer to win the Best Picture category at the Academy Awards
She and her husband Michael Phillips (II) were the first married couple to win Oscars the same year. They were also the first one to win in the same category.
Was a close friend of ''Mama Cass Elliot, sometimes playing the card game Canasta with her.
