The Oscar-winning producer of such films as The Sting and Taxi Driver, who went from Hollywood power player to acclaimed (and infamous) author with her 1991 Tinseltown tell-all You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, has died of cancer. She was 57.
Phillips died Tuesday at her Hollywood home after battling the disease since August, after it had spread throughout her body, according to wire reports.
Over four decades, the spiky-haired movie maven broke ground as a female in Hollywood, producing a string of successful films, including Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. At age 29, she became the first woman to earn a Best Picture Oscar, for coproducing The Sting in 1973.
"You can imagine what a trip this is for a Jewish girl from Great Neck," she said in her acceptance speech. "I get to win an Academy Award and meet Elizabeth Taylor at the same time."
Interestingly, Phillips would later admit that she was actually high on "a diet pill, a small amount of coke, two joints, six halves of Valium, which make three, and a glass and a half of wine" when she accepted her Oscar--one of several shocking tidbits about herself and others revealed in her scandalous 1991 book, which earned her more than a few enemies in the Industry.
You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again was a revealing tale of her high times in Hollywood, the breakup of her marriage to producer partner Michael Phillips and her downfall into the grips of cocaine addiction. The book also took jabs at several big Hollywood names, including Spielberg, David Geffen, Warren Beatty, Barbra Streisand and Goldie Hawn.
She described Hawn as being, um, hygienically challenged, while Beatty, she wrote, once propositioned Phillips and her 12-year-old daughter for a threesome. Phillips purportedly replied, "Warren, we're both too mature for you."
Immediately after the book's release, Geffen (whom she described as looking like a "middle-aged baby") fired her from the film Interview with the Vampire. But even immediately prior to her death, Phillips expressed few regrets.
"I knew that if this book was going to be commercially viable, I would have to spill my guts," she told the New York Times, in an interview conducted several days before her passing. "I knew I would have to be as honest as possible about myself as I was about all the others."
Phillips was born Julia Miller in Manhattan in 1944. She was raised in Long Island and attended Mount Holyoke. Shortly after graduating, she married Phillips, an investment banker and producer. They divorced months after winning Oscars for The Sting.
With her husband and producer partner Tony Bill, Phillips was a part of the filmmaking movement of the '70s led by young filmmakers like Scorsese and Spielberg. But after her Oscar win, her drug addiction and personal problems caught up with her, and she was essentially fired by Spielberg during Close Encounters.
She cleaned up her life in the early 1980s, and eventually began writing her infamous memoir. Her follow-up efforts included 1995's Driving Under the Affluence, and in 2000, she helped Internet news hound Matt Drudge write his book, Drudge Manifesto.
Still, it was Lunch that remained her most memorable work. Over the years, some of the people she had written about dropped their grudges against her. Others refused. Even if some people criticized the book as too mean, Phillips expressed no regrets.
"We all have our standards," she told the Times. "People behaved in an ugly and despicable fashion towards me. I felt no constraints. Nothing I did in my book is as mean as any of the people I wrote about."
Phillips is survived by her daughter, Kate Phillips, and her brother, Matthew Miller. Funeral services will be private.