Julia Phillips

As a producer in the early-to-mid 1970s, Julia Phillips helped shepherd some of the era's most iconic films to the big screen and consequently became the first woman to ever win an Academy Award as a producer. In partnership with her then-husband Michael Phillips, she made her debut with "Steelyard Blues" (1973) and at age 30 won the Oscar for producing "The Sting" (1973), one of the biggest hits of the decade. Phillips went on to produce "Taxi Driver" (1976) and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" (1977), only to derail her promising young career with a serious cocaine addiction that stretched well into the 1980s. Her addiction was so debilitating that Phillips rarely produced again and virtually disappeared from the industry into a haze of freebasing and abusive relationships. In 1991, however, Phillips emerged clean and sober, but still as caustic as ever with her tell-all memoir You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, which detailed her rapid rise and fall while managing to alienate a wide swath of celebrities, whose embarrassing behind-the-scenes details were given public viewing. The book became a New York Times bestseller, but at the price of Phillips' permanently ended Hollywood career. Even after her death from cancer in 2002, Phillips had - deservedly or not - maintained the reputation as being the most hated woman in Hollywood.