Kathleen Kennedy’s husband, the producer Frank Marshall, told me a story. Kennedy had grown up on Lake Shasta, in Northern California, and she and her two sisters spent much of their childhood playing on the water. In 1985, when Kennedy and Marshall were co-producing the movie The Color Purple, shot in rural North Carolina, several of the grips working on the film found a lake nearby and decided to go water-skiing. “All the guys are showing off and falling and skiing and falling,” Marshall recalled. Finally, after the boat returned to the dock, somebody asked Kennedy if she’d like to take a turn. She said, “O.K., I’ll give it a try,” Marshall remembered. The crew members started the engine and invited her into the boat, to take her out. Kennedy said, “No, I’ll just start from the dock here.” The request threw the crew members for a loop, but they obliged. The boat started up again and pulled her onto the water. Her skis skimmed the surface of the lake as she took a flawless turn around it, throwing up spray on the curves. As the boat returned to the dock, Kennedy let go of the rope and the momentum carried her right onto the shore—she finished as gracefully as she had started. “She never even got wet,” Marshall said. “After that, the grips never got back in the water.”

After more than three decades making some of the most successful movies of our time, Kathleen Kennedy has become something of an icon. She is perhaps the most powerful woman in Hollywood, but she does not talk much about what it is like being a female executive in a male-dominated industry. That is not her style. Nor is she self-deprecating. She prefers just to have people watch what she does. She is exceedingly uneasy about promoting her own story—unusual for Hollywood, where people rarely take less credit than they deserve.

The list of movies Kennedy has produced is impressive in both box office and prestige. It starts in 1982, with Steven Spielberg’s E.T. Her partnership with Spielberg runs through most of the Indiana Jones series (which was the brainchild of George Lucas), Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, and straight on to Lincoln, which was nominated for 12 Oscars and won 2. In collaboration with her husband or others, she has produced more than 60 movies, including Empire of the Sun, The Goonies, Alive, Young Sherlock Holmes, Cape Fear, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Bridges of Madison County. Together, her movies have earned more than 120 Oscar nominations. Now, with the release of The Force Awakens, which is already one of the most lucrative films in history, Kennedy has become the high priestess of the relaunched Star Wars enterprise. The new movie’s position as the first feminist Star Wars film—with Rey, the breakout female protagonist—only adds to the impression that Kennedy is, as the Star Wars screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan put it, a “secret superhero in training.”

With Frank Marshall while filming Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1980 From the Kennedy/Marshall Company.

“Cinephile Phase”

In November, before the release of The Force Awakens, I met with Kennedy in her office on the seventh floor of the main building on the Lucasfilm campus, in San Francisco’s Presidio park. Kennedy has shoulder-length brown hair and bright-blue eyes that are so vivid I wondered if she wore tinted contacts. (She does not.) Her spacious quarters are decorated in dark wood, Mission-style, and she displays photos of her daughters, now teenagers, when they were in grade school, dressed up as Princess Leia and Darth Vader. She unearthed the pictures when she started as the company’s new co-chair, in 2012. (The older girl is now in college and the younger one is finishing high school.) Her office is pristine, partly because she is barely there. She spends much of her time in London (where The Force Awakens was largely filmed, at Pinewood Studios, and where she and her husband currently live) between working trips to San Francisco (Lucasfilm’s headquarters) and Los Angeles (where the parent company, Disney, is based). Shooting big movies at Pinewood dates back to the early James Bond films.

Kennedy grew up in Redding, California. Her mother was active in the local theater, her father a judge. She has described her childhood as a time when she was given tremendous freedom. She attended San Diego State University, with a major in film and telecommunications, and, after graduating, worked behind a camera for a local news program. She told me that one of her earliest influences in film was David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai. In the course of mentioning her early inspirations—Truffaut, Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman—she also referred to being influenced by “Francis,” as in Francis Ford Coppola, today a close friend. Kennedy confessed to having looked down her nose at one of the biggest films of the era—Spielberg’s Jaws—which she regarded at the time as too lowbrow. “I was in my 70s cinephile phase,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s so insane.” Then, in 1977, she saw Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which persuaded her to go into the movie business. She got a job as an assistant to John Milius, who was then working as a producer for 1941, directed by Spielberg. Spielberg soon hired Kennedy away as his own assistant, and they worked together on Raiders of the Lost Ark, with George Lucas. It was a formative experience for all of them. For one thing, everyone came down with dysentery during filming in Tunisia. That’s why, Harrison Ford would later say, he argued for just shooting the evil master swordsman rather than engaging in a lengthy fight scene.