When Marcia Nasatir became United Artists’ first female production vice president, her job title depended on whom you asked. Her boss called her “our woman vice president.” Studios called her role “Marcia’s job.”

Ms. Nasatir had her own take: when she later created an email address, she included the words “first mogulette.”

At UA, now a subsidiary of MGM Studios, Ms. Nasatir later helped green-light blockbuster films such as “Carrie” and “Rocky.” Her bosses originally envisioned her as a story editor, a traditional job for women in Hollywood. Ms. Nasatir issued an ultimatum: make her production vice president, which no woman had ever been, or she would walk. She became an executive.

Ms. Nasatir helped green-light films such as 1976’s ‘Rocky.’

Photo: Everett Collection

Ms. Nasatir, who died Aug. 3 at 95 years old, in a 2013 essay for The Hollywood Reporter described those and other challenges that came with being a woman in Hollywood’s boys’ club. She joined Orion Pictures after her boss at UA left and she was passed over for his job. At Orion, she never became a partner, which she believed was because of her gender.

“That pissed me off,” she wrote.

When Ms. Nasatir left Orion and joined Carson Productions, she championed “The Big Chill,” which had been rejected by other studios. The film received three Academy Award nominations in 1984. She later became an independent producer and worked on films such as “Hamburger Hill.”

Born Marcia Birenberg in New York City on May 8, 1926, Ms. Nasatir grew up in San Antonio. In a 2018 interview with the San Antonio Current, she spoke of spending childhood Saturday afternoons at the Uptown Theater, where tickets were 25 cents a pop. She credited the weekly matinee habit with her eventual path to the film industry.

In the 1940s she studied journalism at Northwestern University, until her parents pulled her out of school for fear she would marry her boyfriend, Mort Nasatir, her sons said. She enrolled in a local Texas university for a semester, but ended up going to New York and marrying Mr. Nasatir anyway.

Her father worked in dry goods and her mother, an Eastern European immigrant and former garment worker, was a homemaker. Her mother, a union member, shaped her support for underdog stories such “Rocky” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” In Hollywood, young women and others looked to her as a mentor, her son Mark said. “Marcia was the Jewish liberal from New York, you know, find lost causes,” he said.

Jack Nicholson in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ Ms. Nasatir’s mother helped shape her support for movies that featured an underdog.

Photo: Everett Collection

Ms. Nasatir’s path to the film industry started in literature, she wrote in 2013. In the 1960s, she became a secretary at Dell Books, and later joined Bantam Books, where her recommendation to publish the Warren Commission Report helped jump-start the instant books trend. Later, Hollywood literary agent Evarts Ziegler recruited her to California to try his line of work. “Anyone asks me to go to a party, I say yes,” she said in the documentary “A Classy Broad.”

Ms. Nasatir died of heart and kidney failure on Aug. 3 in the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Country House and Hospital. She didn’t remarry following her divorce from former MGM Records president Mort Nasatir, with whom she shares her children. She is survived by her two sons, her sister Rose and two grandchildren.

“My philosophy of life, which is going on my tombstone, is, something doesn’t work out…it’s ‘Done. Next,’ ” Ms. Nasatir said in the documentary.