Who

Supremely well-connected Rosenthal runs the movie production company Tribeca Productions, which she co-founded with Robert De Niro. She's also a co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival, and the wife of Craig Hatkoff.

Backstory

Rosenthal grew up in Providence and first studied at Brown, moving to Manhattan in 1975 to finish up at NYU. Her career in entertainment started at CBS, where she spent nine years producing made-for-TV movies before decamping to Disney. Her stint at the Mouse House only lasted a year, but it did introduce her to Martin Scorsese—she was Disney's production executive on The Color of Money—who put her in touch with Robert De Niro, who was scouting for someone to help him run his own production company at the time.

In 1989 the pair went into business together with Tribeca Productions. Since then they've produced more than two dozen movies, most of them starring De Niro, including hits like Analyze This, Analyze That, About a Boy, and Meet the Parents, as well as occasional moneylosers like The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle in 2000 and The Good Shepherd in 2006. An odd coupling—Rosenthal is diplomatic and energetic, De Niro is fairly introverted—theirs has been one of the more enduring partnerships in the notoriously precarious business of film. And the two have partnered on a series of other projects, most notably the Tribeca Film Festival, which De Niro and Rosenthal started up after Sept. 11th along with Rosenthal's husband, real estate investor Craig Hatkoff.

Of note

Rosenthal's career as a film producer has minted her a small fortune over the years, but she'll likely be best remembered for her role in creating the Tribeca Film Festival. Founded in the aftermath of Sept. 11th, the fest now lures close to half a million movie buffs to lower Manhattan each spring and has increasingly become a locus of frenzied film-acquisition deals by studio execs. While the festival's executive director, Peter Scarlet, handles the fest's lineup of films, it's been Rosenthal job to attract big box office debuts and high-profile advertisers, and it's largely thanks to her massive Rolodex that Tribeca has become such a cultural phenomenon in the city. Yet despite her valiant efforts to make Tribeca profitable—the festival is not, in fact, a non-profit, it's run by Tribeca Enterprises, a company the trio founded in 2003—it has struggled financially.

To help offset the deficits, Rosenthal, Hatkoff, and De Niro upped ticket prices by 50 percent in 2007, much to the chagrin of longtime festival-goers. The ensuing criticism led them to lower prices in 2008, as well as reduce the number of features included in the lineup, a response to those who argued that the festival was getting too large for its own good. There's now a possibility that the festival will be moving. In 2007, Rosenthal, De Niro and Hatkoff teamed up with Steve Ross's Related Companies and Cirque du Soleil to submit a proposal for Pier 40; the plan involves the creation of an entertainment complex that would screen movies all year long as well as house the festival every spring.

Campaign trail

Thanks in part to Rosenthal's sister-in-law, Susan Patricof, who is married to venture capital kingpin and Bill Clinton superfan Alan Patricof, Rosenthal and Hatkoff have been prominent Democratic donors for more than a decade. Rosenthal has personally handed over more than $100,000 to various Democratic candidates and causes since 2004, and the couple regularly host pricey fundraising dinners in Manhattan and the Hamptons.

For the record

In 2006, Rosenthal, Hatkoff and De Niro were in negotiations to purchase the Observer from longtime owner Arthur Carter. The Tribeca trifecta balked at the $10 million price tag, though, and Jared Kushner walked away with the salmon-colored weekly instead.

Personal

Rosenthal met her husband through De Niro: The actor reached out to Hatkoff in the late 1980s when the producing pair was seeking financing for their Tribeca Film Center. The couple and their two kids, Juliana and Isabella, live in the Dakota on the Upper West Side; the apartment is filled with Rosenthal's collection of antique globes and dozens of guitars that Hatkoff has acquired over the years. They spends weekends in Water Mill.

Family ties

Rosenthal and Hatkoff have been padding their daughters' college applications since the day they came out of the womb. Their eldest, Juliana, published two books with her dad as co-author before she turned 10. (The first, Ladder 35, Engine 40, featured introductions by George Pataki and Harold Koplewicz; she followed up with 2004's Good-Bye Tonsils!) Isabella, for her part, teamed up with her dad to publish 2006's bestselling hippopotamus-tortoise friendship tale Owen & Mzee.

True story

The late playwright Wendy Wasserstein and Rosenthal were very close friends. Wasserstein gave her daughter the middle name "Jane" in honor of her pal.