20-03-2025
Ask Chris: Who was the first female movie executive?
FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, Sherry Lansing made headlines around the world when the former math-teacher-turned-model-turned-actress-turned-executive broke the glass ceiling of the movie industry by being named head of 20th Century Fox. The Oscar-nominated producer was honored with footprints at Grauman's Chinese Theater and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Lansing's appointment was a milestone, but not the first time ladies were in charge. 'Bottom line,' historian Mindy Johnson, author of Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney's Animation, says, 'there were more women in power — in front of and behind the camera — in the silent era, than there are today.'
In 1912, actor/writer/director Lois Weber took over Universal's Rex Motion Picture brand. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were dating when they teamed up with Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith to launch their United Artists studio in 1919. Another actress, Mabel Normand, became a director and ran the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. 'The whole industry was small studios,' Johnson says. 'And many were owned and run by women.'
Marion Fairfax, who adapted the dinosaur action epic The Lost World in 1925, was one of the women who formed her own production company. Producer Margaret Winkler was a titan in the animation industry, distributing Felix the Cat, Fleischer cartoons, and Walt Disney's first films.
In 1945, Virginia Van Upp, who had written and produced hit films for Rita Hayworth, was chosen by Columbia Pictures chief Harry Cohn to supervise all production at stat studio, the last time a woman would hold that position for many years. Said Lansing in 1980, 'I hope as the new decade goes on, the appointment of a woman to a major post will not be so noteworthy: That it will become natural for women to have high positions in every industry.'
