BRAIN TUMOR CLAIMS PRODUCER DAWN STEEL; EXEC WAS 1ST WOMAN TO HEAD MAJOR STUDIO.

Byline: Bernard Weinraub The New York Times

Dawn Steel, the first woman to head a major movie studio and who played a prominent role advancing other women to top jobs in Hollywood, died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. She was 51 and lived in Los Angeles.

Film producer Charles Roven, Steel's husband, said Steel had been suffering from a malignant brain tumor.

``When I got the call 21 months ago from the doctor about Dawn's condition,'' said Roven, ``I was told that 97 percent of the people who had this die within the first six months. It goes to show what spirit she had.''

Steel, who came to Hollywood in the 1970s to take a merchandising job at Paramount, rose quickly through the ranks to become president of production at that studio, where she oversaw the development of such films as ``Flashdance,'' ``Footloose,'' ``Top Gun,'' ``The Untouchables,'' ``Fatal Attraction'' and ``The Accused.'' She became the first woman to head a major studio when she held the top job at Columbia Studios from October 1987 until January 1991. During her reign, the studio's films included ``Awakenings,'' ``Flatliners,'' ``Ghostbusters 2'' and ``Casualties of War.''

Steel produced several movies in recent years, among them ``Cool Runnings,'' a highly successful comedy about a Jamaican bobsled team. She and Roven have produced ``Fallen,'' starring Denzel Washington, and ``City of Angels,'' with Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage, both to be released next year.

Steel's career and life were marked by a powerful, even outsize, personality that helped her succeed in a business dominated by men. ``She was highly opinionated, extremely self-confident, had a fantastic sense of humor and was someone of enormous style and taste,'' said Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the partners of DreamWorks SKG, and an early mentor of Steel's at Paramount, along with Michael Eisner and Barry Diller. He added, ``Maybe under the facade she was scared and intimidated by it all, but I didn't see a scintilla of that.''

Writer Nora Ephron, who was given her first directorial job by Steel, said: ``Dawn certainly wasn't the first woman to become powerful in Hollywood, but she was the first woman to understand that part of her responsibility was to make sure that eventually there were lots of other powerful women. She hired women as executives, women as producers and directors, women as marketing people.

``The situation we have today, with a huge number of women in powerful positions, is largely because of Dawn Steel,'' said Ephron.

Steel was also one of President Clinton's earliest supporters in Hollywood. In the past year, Clinton had phoned her several times, and Hillary Rodham Clinton privately visited Steel at her lavish L.A. home in Coldwater Canyon.

Characteristically, Steel often laughed with friends when recalling her first meeting with Clinton.

``You're not as bad as I thought you'd be,'' Clinton told her.

Steel's skill as an executive was sometimes overshadowed by a reputation for an abrasive, take-no-prisoners style. She was called Steel Dawn and the Tank. ``It hurt me deeply, this reputation as tough, hard, mean,'' she said in 1993, following the publication of her autobiography ``They Can Kill You, but They Can't Eat You: Lessons From the Front.'' She added: ``It was very painful, it came from guys who wanted to kill me. In some ways I was curt because there's an unbelievable amount to accomplish in a day.''

``Look, I'm not Mary Poppins,'' she said at another point, ``but I think I functioned with integrity.''

The films that Steel most enjoyed seeing and making - such as ``Flashdance,'' about a female welder who wants to dance, and ``Cool Runnings'' - were personal to her. These are stories of outsiders with outlandish ambitions who overcome numerous obstacles to get what they want. ``She had a formula for many of her movies that carried a simple truth: You want something, you work incredibly hard, you get it,'' said Lucy Fisher, vice chairwoman of the Columbia Tri-Star Motion Picture Group, and one of her close friends.

Although Steel often said that she was just ``an ordinary middle-class girl from New York,'' her life was far from ordinary and, like many other wealthy and successful moguls in Hollywood, self-invented.

She was born in the Bronx, N.Y., on Aug. 19, 1946, and grew up in New York City and ``in a crummy neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks'' in Great Neck, N.Y., according to her autobiography. Her father, Nat, was a zipper salesman to the military who had a nervous breakdown when she was a child; her mother, Lillian, was a formidable businesswoman compelled to work to support the family. (The family's name was originally Spielberg, but her father changed it to Steel to reflect his prowess as a semiprofessional weight lifter).

Steel ran out of money after a year at Boston University, and attended New York University's School of Commerce for two years, studying marketing. By 1968, Steel was working as a receptionist in the garment district and soon found a low-level marketing job at Penthouse magazine devising X-rated products. (She initially told her parents she was working at Mademoiselle.)

Answering phones at Penthouse, Steel noticed that amaryllis plants took on a phallic look just before blooming. As she recalled, she hired an artist to exaggerate the effect and wrote her own copy for the ad: ``Grow your own. . . . All it takes is $6.98 and a lot of love.'' The plant was so popular that Penthouse could not keep it in stock.

Steel's tenacity, and flair for theatrics, was made evident in 1975 while she was traveling through Europe looking for gimmicky gift ideas. She came up with the notion of poking fun at the Gucci label by stamping it on toilet paper. She solicited orders from boutiques and formed her own company, Oh Dawn

Inc., she said, ``because when I said I was in the toilet-paper business, people would say, `Oh Dawn!' ''

Soon enough, the Gucci family sued her for copyright infringement. Sid Davidoff, a lawyer and former administrative assistant to New York City Mayor John Lindsay, agreed to take her case even though, he later recalled, she ``didn't have a dime, she was living by her wits.'' Davidoff, building a First Amendment defense, made sure the New York tabloids heard about the case, which was quickly headlined ``the toilet paper caper,'' and resulted in an editorial cartoon showing the Gucci family as Goliath and poor Dawn Steel as David. The case was settled out of court.

By 1978, Steel had ended a 10-month marriage, sold her business to her ex-husband and asked Davidoff to place a call to his friend Katzenberg about a marketing job for her at Paramount. She was hired and quickly impressed her bosses.

Asked in 1993 why men like Eisner and Katzenberg had rapidly advanced her career, Steel replied: ``One was that I was funny. I wasn't heavy furniture. I made them laugh and entertained them. And the other thing was that I could identify a good idea. Not a lot of people can do that. That was my gift.''

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Photo: (color) Steel