Women in Entertainment 2009

When one of your earliest memories is of a rocket exploding nearby, it's hard to be fazed by Hollywood. "I lived in Lebanon during the civil war," Kwan-Rubinek recalls of her childhood. "I remember walking around during a ceasefire, when suddenly there was a whistle overhead and a rocket basically had crashed into the building down the road and we were all running for our lives." That was just one of the experiences that shaped the exec, who grew up in Hong Kong, Lebanon, Bahrain, Germany, Holland, France and the U.S., with a Chinese dad and a German mother. Fluent in several languages, she has brought her international perspective to a studio that thinks globally -- witness her recent hits "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" and "The Hangover." Now based in L.A., she says her fondest memories are of Holland, though she still calls Hong Kong home.