BEVERLY HILLS, C.A. - Sue Mengers, one of Hollywood's most influential and colorful agents, as well as a Utica native, has died.

The child of German refugees, Mengers began her career as a receptionist at MCA talent agency before being hired as a secretary at the William Morris Agency.

Mengers, who at her peak in the 1970s represented such stars as Barbra Streisand, Bob Fosse, Michael Caine, Peter Bogdanovich, Ryan O'Neal and Faye Dunaway, blazed a trail for women agents in Hollywood. The child of German refugees, she began her career as a receptionist at MCA talent agency before being hired as a secretary at the William Morris Agency. She would go on to become an agent in 1967 at Creative Management Agency, which merged with International Famous Agency in 1975 to become ICM. Mengers stepped down from ICM in 1986, returned to two years later for a brief stint at WMA, before permanently retiring.

Famous for her sharp, often caustic wit and her star-studded dinner parties, the larger-than-life Mengers was the inspiration for the character played by Dyan Cannon in the 1973 comedy mystery The Last of Sheila, co-written by Anthony Perkins, who was another of her clients.

Mengers was born about 1931 in Hamburg, Germany. About 1938, she arrived in the United States at age eight with her parents, a family of refugees from the Holocaust. Neither of her parents spoke English at the time and settling in Utica, New York, her father eventually became a traveling salesman. When Sue was about eleven years old, her father committed suicide and she and her mother relocated to The Bronx in New York City, where her mother took a job as a bookkeeper

Her husband, director Jean-Claude Tramont, who she married in 1973, died in 1996.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Mengers died at her home in Beverly Hills after a series of small strokes. She was 81 years old.