Dawn Steel
Entrepreneur
Head of Columbia Pictures who became one of the first women to run a major motion picture studio.
She worked as merchandising director for Penthouse Magazine and ran her own novelty-item business. She joined Paramount Pictures in 1978.
She helped produce Fatal Attraction, Top Gun, and Flashdance for Paramount. She then took the helm at Columbia, but after several years of losses, she left to found her own company Atlas Entertainment.
She was born Dawn Spielberg (no relation to the filmmaker Steven) in New York. Her father changed the family name to Steel.
She was mentioned in an episode of Entourage, where a character asked the talent agent Ari Gold, played by Jeremy Piven, if Steel was still running the studio.