The Most Powerful Woman in Hollywood You’ve Never Heard Of

They say this town is ruled by fear. They say it’s all gloom these days when not outright doom. They say Hollywood just isn’t what it used to be. Not warm, not wild, not fun.

They may be right. But they obviously aren’t spending time in proximity to Colleen Camp, the if-you-know-you-know fairy godmother of the film business. A veteran character actress turned social networker extraordinaire turned indie producer, she’s close friends with seemingly every bold-faced name in the industry — from Jerry Bruckheimer to Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who name-checked her in her Oscar acceptance speech this year) — and who has in recent years built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s most influential awards-season players. Camp’s intimate, no-press-allowed screenings, high-powered parties, star-studded dinners and assorted taste-making receptions have already altered the trajectories of scores of Oscar campaigns.

“I’m an empath and an enthusiast,” is how she describes herself during one of a series of lunches at San Vicente Bungalows in West Hollywood. “I’m also a fixer.”

Bruckheimer, who’s known Camp since the 1970s and tapped her talents this cycle on his indie film Young Woman and the Sea, offers another description. “She’s a kingmaker,” he says, “just a great force. You always want her on your side if you want to win.”

If he’s exaggerating, it’s not by much.

Camp, 71, was the hidden hand behind Parasite’s 2020 best picture Oscar victory (“such an unforgettable journey with Colleen,” recounts executive producer Miky Lee). The same year, she helped build buzz for winners The Joker and Marriage Story. American Fiction, Bohemian Rhapsody, BlacKkKlansman, Hidden Figures, Minari, Cold War, Roma, Black Swan — her fingerprints were all over those campaigns as well. Not only was Camp the one who orchestrated the screening at a Beverly Hills mansion that turned Andrea Riseborough into an out-of-left-field 2023 best actress nominee (for To Leslie), she also “curated things” to advance the causes of Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ana de Armas for Blonde and Cate Blanchett for Tár that year.

“The breadth and depth and authenticity of her relationships is unmatched,” says Netflix top awards strategist Lisa Taback, who enlisted her longtime pal to help promote Emilia Pérez this season. “In a town where everyone says they’re friends with whoever, she actually is, and there’s always an interesting story to go along with it.”

Another friend, David O. Russell, has not only depended on Camp for her awards savvy (on campaigns for films like The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook) but has also from time to time cast her in his movies (like American Hustle and Amsterdam). “She’s the canary in the coal mine of cinema,” is how he thinks of her. “As well as its heart.”

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The first signs of Camp’s talent as an awards-season rainmaker emerged in 2000, when she and then-husband John Goldwyn — who at the time held a senior role at Paramount — threw a party at their Brentwood home for Alexander Payne’s Election, in which Camp appeared opposite Reese Witherspoon as the mother of teenage terror Tracy Flick. “She was so proud of this little film that she invited a bunch of the celebrities that she carried around in her purse like so much loose change,” Payne says, explaining how Camp backed into her role as an awards influencer. “Then she must have asked herself, ‘What other filmmakers can I do this for?’ “

Her role in Election was already well past Camp’s 100th screen appearance; the first was a role on a 1973 episode of Love, American Style. Her early acting career leveraged her va-va-voom looks and bubbly persona in fare like The Swinging Cheerleaders, but she also found work with some future cinematic legends, like Francis Ford Coppola, who cast her as visiting USO playmate Miss May in Apocalypse Now. “She was this voluptuous, effervescent presence,” recalls Roman Coppola, who first encountered Camp on his father’s Philippines set. “I was an 11-year-old kid, so there was this … awe.”

Over the years, Camp has built a respectable, if not always highbrow, acting résumé. She played the wife of the arcade mogul in Wayne’s World, the open-minded mom in Valley Girl (“I love that performance,” gushes Sofia Coppola), the firearms-passionate romantic interest in Police Academy and the French maid Yvette in Clue (“People are obsessed with Clue — it always amazes me,” Camp says).

What would turn out to be even more valuable than the expansive IMDb credits, though, were the myriad close connections she cultivated on all those sets, setting up Camp as a Malcolm Gladwell-style super-connector, the center of a web of power players that would eventually turn her not merely into the awards-season secret weapon that she is today, but also into something of a Hollywood consigliere.

“She has this cosmic swirl that’s happening at all times,” says Longlegs director Osgood Perkins, who first met Camp through his parents, Anthony Perkins and Berry Berenson (and who cast her in an episode he helmed of Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot). “If you’re lucky enough to be pulled into her whirlpool, it’s an amazing ride.” Perkins believes Camp possesses nearly magical powers to divine what’s “bubbling under the surface of Hollywood” and a singular ability to sprinkle career-altering stardust. “If she chooses to sprinkle it on you,” he says, “it can really help in such a hideous bitch-goddess of a business.”

Bond franchise producer Barbara Broccoli, yet another longtime friend, also describes Camp as part wizard. “She’s amazing on casting ideas and script notes,” Broccoli says. “Important filmmakers want to show her their cut early. She’s just an incredible resource for people to bounce ideas off because she’s got that rare thing: great taste. People rely on her a great deal. There’s just no one else like her.”

Camp, in her signature cat-eye glasses and long strands of pearls, downplays such plaudits, launching instead into a riff about her photographic memory. This soon veers into a discussion about her role as an Alzheimer’s patient opposite Shirley MacLaine in the upcoming film People Not Places.

Talking with Camp, one quickly learns, is a nonlinear experience. Without fail, her stories branch off midway, often midsentence, to another anecdote, then another and another, each told with a distinct blend of urgency and exuberance. She calls these verbal cul-de-sacs “sidebars.”

“The thing is, there’s no brief conversation with Colleen — it doesn’t exist,” explains Guillermo del Toro. “She’s my favorite person who I can call on a drive to San Francisco. You could land her in the Gobi Desert and she’d become everybody’s favorite person.”

“Going out to dinner with my mom is like sitting with a mob boss,” says her only child, daughter Emily Goldwyn. “Hundreds of people come over to the table, and she’ll engage with every single person in this really intense way.”

Indeed, over one lunch at the Bungalows, there’s a constant parade of greeters: As soon as the head of a top talent agency’s film department is done embracing her, a billionaire heiress is cooing over her. “The guest lists at her parties are unfathomable,” marvels Randolph. “She gets Pacino, Hoffman, DiCaprio for these private dinners. To them, it’s, ‘Colleen, whatever you want.’ And it’s probably because she helped them, too.”

Camp is easy about expressing adoration. She freely declares her love and speaks in superlatives, to the point of caricature. Says Lee Daniels with an affectionate laugh: “I can hear her now: ‘You’re brilliant!’ ‘That’s brilliant!’ ‘This is brilliant!’ ” Payne notes that “some people may roll their eyes when she tells so many people she loves them. If you don’t know her, you may think it’s the emptiest of Hollywood hyperbole. But the thing is, she means it. It’s genuine. She’s just so sincere that she can appear insincere.”

One of Camp’s favorite activities is making introductions. “Nothing makes me happier than saying, ‘You should meet …,’ ” she notes, “whether it’s a fitness coach or a therapist or an interior designer. I’m a broker of people, a matchmaker.” Sometimes in the most traditional sense. She’s particularly proud of having connected two Oscar-winning youngish directors, who are now in love. “I approached that in the same way I would a piece of casting or seating for a dinner party,” Camp explains. “Who are the right people that should get together? Who would be interesting to talk to each other? Who might have an interesting and even unconventional dynamic?”

The same relational instinct has, by her account, also helped her end famous industry feuds by inviting nemeses to her events, then nudging peace. Alan Ladd Jr. and Peter Guber patched things up at her place. Years later, George Clooney and Russell did the same. “If you took her to the Middle East, she might be able to fix that,” jokes her daughter. “She can de-escalate situations when she wants to.”

Russell recalls wandering into the kitchen at one of Camp’s parties at her Brentwood residence at 2 in the morning and finding “Quentin Tarantino, Quincy Jones, Cher, Dan Aykroyd and Mark Wahlberg. Everyone was truly letting their hair down and being comfortable and just hanging because her home was safe, and everyone felt like a family friend.”

Camp has lost many of those family friends in recent years. Kirstie Alley, Roger Corman, Peter Aykroyd, Kelly Preston, Robert Towne and Al Ruddy, to name a few. “It’s hit me very hard,” she says. “It’s made me live more in the moment.”

It’s also segued into a sobering new act of event-hosting — memorials. She organized Peter Bogdanovich’s 2022 tribute, then was responsible this summer for that of the beloved producer Fred Roos, whom she knew for half a century. Camp even visited Pierce Brothers, the Westwood cemetery known for its lode of interred Hollywood figures, to help her friend land in an appropriate burial plot. “I found Fred a very nice spot close by Josef von Sternberg,” she says before mordantly observing: “Shopping for the ‘right’ plot — it’d make for a great scene in a script.”

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Camp’s own backstory would make for a pretty great scene in a script as well.

Her father and mother decamped from the dampness of San Francisco for Los Angeles largely in search of drier air for their asthmatic only daughter. “I almost died twice before I was 7 from bronchial pneumonia, and I was in an oxygen chamber at 10,” she says. Her family, including two brothers, were connected through their adoration for movies and music. “My mother was a brilliant jazz pianist, although for all intents and purposes she was a housewife,” she explains. “Both of my parents would perform in community theater.” Her father, who managed a grocery store in San Francisco, worked as a movie set grip once they moved to L.A. Later, with assistance from his by-then-successful daughter, he landed a few small acting parts in his final years.

Camp bought her first house in North Hollywood, not far from where she grew up in the San Fernando Valley, in part with the money she made for portraying Miss May. For the past three decades, she’s leased it to a key figure in the Hollywood acting community who died a few years ago. His widow, who doesn’t pay rent because she can’t afford it, still lives there. “There’s 20 dogs running amok all over that house — it’s a wreck,” Camp says.

Camp married into Hollywood royalty when she wed John Goldwyn in 1986. While he would go on to become the vice chairman of Paramount (he’s now a producer), when they met he was still a junior development executive at The Ladd Co., having just been promoted from being Ladd’s driver. “I was the big breadwinner when we first got married,” Camp says, noting she had to win over his father, legendary producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. “Sam’s idea of the perfect person for John would’ve been Katrina vanden Heuvel,” she explains, referring to the well-bred publisher of The Nation and member of the Council on Foreign Relations. “I was Stella Dallas.”

Camp’s marriage to Goldwyn ended in 2001 after, in her words, “John had a lifestyle change.” Her good friend Gore Vidal “thought it was a huge mistake to break up,” she recalls. “We talked about other [Hollywood] couples that stayed together. He felt that John and I were an amazing couple, that we were a very good team.”

Goldwyn is now married to Jeff Klein, the hospitality impresario behind the Sunset Tower. The three are close; according to Klein, she helped him raise seed capital for the Bungalows. “Jeff has a lot of my traits: curious, ambitious, outgoing,” she says. “It’s been said that John remarried a different version of me.”

Klein and Camp’s daughter compare her to Lucy Ricardo. “She’s like a hurricane walking into a room,” he says. “There’s always some drama that she turns into comedy.” Adds Emily, “She’s this funny, over-the-top character who’s always at the center of these situations that feel hijinks-y.”

Director Marc Forster — yet another longtime pal — recalls dining with Camp and Broccoli in Beverly Hills some years ago. Long story short, “Her tooth ended up stuck in a steak — and she had no vanity about it!” he recalls with a laugh. “Everybody else would’ve reacted completely differently, myself included. But to her, it’s a slapstick moment. We took a picture of her without the tooth, which she had fixed the next day.”

Klein explains that Camp is often compared to another grande dame Hollywood hostess and connector: the late superagent Sue Mengers. But that gets it wrong. “Sue was biting,” he explains. “Colleen is funny and self- deprecating. She’ll stop at nothing to get a laugh. She’ll step in a garbage can. It’s like vaudeville.”

In 2020, international headlines blared that Camp, then 67, was engaged to Garrett Moore, the 34-year-old son of an Irish peer, the Earl of Drogheda, whose own London-based events firm is well regarded for its private parties. (They’d met through Forster.) “It may seem Harold and Maude to some on the sidelines, but I prefer the idea of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate,” Moore told the Daily Mail. Nuptials, though, never transpired. Camp now laughs off the May-December pairing as a joke that went too far. “We never even kissed,” she says. Not that Camp thinks it was an outlandish idea. She highlights Joan Collins’ marriage to Percy Gibson, 32 years Collins’ junior. “As Joan said, ‘When he dies, he dies!’ “

Turning serious, Camp says, “I’ve had no interest in ever remarrying. I have close friends. I have allies. I have my daughter. I have John and Jeff in a different way.”

Instead, she’s focused her attention on helping her connections win Oscars (for which, her friends lament, she is woefully underpaid, suggesting she could earn much more for such a priceless skill set) and maybe, down the line, picking up a couple for herself, as an independent producer. Producing, though, has proved more stressful than she’d anticipated. She thought she’d lucked out in finding a backer in William Santor, the head of finance and production company Productivity Media Inc., who agreed to bankroll several of Camp’s films. “Who else would give Jack Huston $10 million to direct a black-and-white movie made with Michael Pitt?” she says of one of her productions, the buzzy boxing drama The Day of the Fight, set for release Dec. 6. Yet she soon uncovered questionable money issues and notified producers on other PMI-funded films in late 2022. “I’ve had cortisol levels through the roof,” she says.

In September, THR broke the news that Santor had been suspended as CEO amid a probe over allegations of financial mismanagement. (A possible red flag: Santor had established a multi-production pact for PMI with the Cayman Islands — known for its offshore banking, not its entertainment production.) Rebel Wilson, whose forthcoming comedy Bride Hard, produced by Camp, had to be extricated from PMI, isn’t surprised that Camp was the one who first spotted the trouble. “She has a Baby Reindeer-type of obsessiveness for finding out the truth about situations,” she says before switching metaphors. “She has this Miss Marple way of investigating. She has her ear to the ground. She’s very unassuming because she’s so pure. So, you don’t see her coming. But she’ll get to the bottom of things.”

Broccoli finds another classic character to compare her to: “She’s like Auntie Mame,” she says. “But then there’s a very business-like side to her. She’ll be talking to someone on the phone — nowhere near a computer —and she’ll say, ‘Wait a minute, in that contract, paragraph nine, it mentions this thing.’ It’s all in that brain, which is encyclopedic. She’s gregarious but also serious.”

And also, at times, a bit mysterious, a much more complicated woman than her social superpowers and madcap demeanor might suggest.

Shortly after one final lunch at the Bungalows, THR met with her again at her friend Nathalie Marciano’s art-filled house in Beverly Hills, where she arrived to be photographed for this story. She’d just left a Bride Hard editing session with Wilson in Westwood and later that day would host a documentary screening at a house in the Hollywood Hills for a group that would include Al Pacino and billionaire philanthropist Nicolas Berggruen. Before the photo shoot began, Camp rolled calls, made snap decisions, put out fires, reconnected with friends, persuaded, clarified, reminisced, laughed and — on multiple occasions — unabashedly cried.

In other words, it was the usual Colleen Camp chaos. She says she wouldn’t have it any other way. “I do this for the movies,” she insists. “I’m just crazy about the movies.”

This story appeared in the Dec. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.