Laura Ziskin, who has died aged 61 from breast cancer, was an influential and widely liked Hollywood producer who presided over the breakthrough films of stars including Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts and Kevin Costner. She demonstrated an aptitude for shaping commercial hits, such as the Spider-Man movies, alongside riskier projects.
As a producer with a contract at Sony and the former president of Fox 2000 (a specialist division of 20th Century-Fox), she was one of the first generation of women, along with Sherry Lansing and Amy Pascal, to occupy positions of power in a male-dominated industry. "There are a good dozen women producers consistently working in features, making movies," she said in 1998. "Not one-offs, not one movie every 10 years, but consistently making movies. This is quite a change, a revolution."
Ziskin was born in the San Fernando Valley, California, and graduated in 1973 from the University of Southern California's school of cinematic arts. "When I got out of film school, there was only one woman producer I had ever heard of," she said. "Somewhere along the way I stopped and thought, 'Wait a minute, there's nobody doing what I want to do.'" In 1976 she got her first movie credit, as assistant to the producer Jon Peters on the Barbra Streisand/Kris Kristofferson remake of A Star is Born. Two years later she was an associate producer on the psychological thriller Eyes of Laura Mars, starring Faye Dunaway. Her producing career began in earnest in the mid-1980s on projects including two film noir remakes – the suspenseful No Way Out (1987), based on The Big Clock (1948), and the enjoyably trashy D.O.A. (1988), adapted from the 1950 thriller of the same name.
Ziskin had her first taste of global success when she was executive producer on Pretty Woman, the 1990 romantic comedy about a prostitute (Roberts) and her wealthy client (Richard Gere). The film grossed over $450m, on a budget of $14m, but its success only demonstrated to Ziskin how out of touch much of the film industry still was. "Every time a movie comes out that works for women, and I had this experience with Pretty Woman, I get phone calls from the press that go something like this: 'Gee, is this a trend?' or 'You know, is this a new thing, that women are ... ?' It happens over and over again. It is so astonishing that you begin to wonder why. Well, it's because, in spite of those women who run studios, the powers that be, the senior management, are men."
She went on to produce the anarchic Bill Murray comedy What About Bob? (1991) and Stephen Frears's Hero (1992), starring Dustin Hoffman and released in the UK as The Accidental Hero. She also received a story credit on both pictures. A turning point arrived while she was putting together, under her own company, Laura Ziskin Productions, the black comedy To Die For (1995), the film that first proved Kidman's acting range.
Ziskin's thwarted attempts to schedule the film's Canada-based production around the education of her daughter (by her ex-husband, the screenwriter Julian Barry) made her comprehend the impact her career was having on her family life. "I had this sinking feeling that the production would begin right in the middle of the school year. Sure enough, it did. It was also my daughter's last year in elementary school. I sat her down and said, 'Julia, we're going to Canada for three months.' And she said, 'I'm not going.' Then she looked at me, burst into tears and said, 'And you can't go. Tell them you can't go.'"
The invitation to lead Fox 2000 arrived around the same time, allowing Ziskin a more grounded professional life than she had enjoyed as an independent producer. She was, she freely admitted, the beneficiary of a kind of positive discrimination, but regarded this as beneficial to the film industry and, in turn, to cinemagoers. "My boss at Fox, Bill Mechanic, made a calculated business decision. He looked at the audience in demographic terms and recognised that more than half were women. [Fox] needed a little oestrogen in the room."
Although she executive-produced the multiple Oscar-winning romantic comedy As Good As It Gets (1997) at Sony, Ziskin devoted most of her time to bringing to the screen some of the less bankable projects on the Fox slate. Among these were The Thin Red Line (1998), which marked the return to directing of the elusive auteur Terrence Malick after a 20-year hiatus, and David Fincher's abrasive Fight Club (1999).
When Ziskin attended a meeting at which the romantic comedy Hope Floats was being pitched, she was aggrieved to find that her enthusiasm for the script was not shared by her male colleagues, who "could not have been less interested". Mechanic's strategy, she realised, had paid off. "Had I not been in the room, there would have been no one there who was the audience for this movie. It was a moment where I felt quite potent. I stood up and said, 'Excuse me, you guys. This is not a movie for you. You don't have to get it. I love this movie and I'm the audience and I'm who you're going to be marketing to.' The movie got made and went on to make a lot of money."
She resigned from Fox 2000 in late 1999 and secured a deal at Sony. There, she produced Spider-Man (2002), starring Tobey Maguire as the teenage superhero, at the same time as she was appointed the first woman to produce the Oscar telecast (a job she repeated in 2007). Under the direction of Sam Raimi, Spider-Man was a witty, imaginative blockbuster that generated a worldwide gross of more than $800m and spawned two further instalments.
But the third movie in the series, while more commercially lucrative than the first, was considered even by Raimi to be overloaded with characters and incident. The drastic option of starting all over again was proposed in order to rejuvenate the franchise. At the time of her death, Ziskin was in the midst of producing this "reboot", The Amazing Spider-Man, starring Andrew Garfield in the lead. (The film is scheduled for release in July 2012.) Ziskin had several other projects in development, including a movie version of the stage hit Enron, which George Clooney will produce, direct and possibly star in.
Since being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004, Ziskin had largely devoted her life to raising money and awareness. These efforts had latterly been channelled through the organisation Stand Up to Cancer, of which Ziskin was a co-founder. She is survived by her partner, the screenwriter Alvin Sargent, and Julia.