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In her time in Hollywood, as a producer and as the first female head of a major film studio, Sherry Lansing was responsible for developing and distributing more than 200 films, telling memorable stories like “Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Forrest Gump,”“Braveheart” and “Titanic.”

But she’s spending the second half of her life telling a different sort of story — one literally about life and death.

“I think I was 40 when my mother died, and unfortunately I got a very quick education about cancer as I watched her suffer,” Lansing, the former CEO of Paramount Studios, remembers. “She was diagnosed at the beginning, and when she passed away, I thought that the only way to honor her memory was to raise money for cancer research so that no one else suffered like she suffered.”

She will share the benefit of that hard-won education as the keynote speaker for Monday’s “Time Is Of The Essence” luncheon at Mar-A-Lago, sponsored by Hearing the Ovarian Cancer Whisper (HOW).

“I started out as a patient advocate, to raise money for research and find a cure. I was 40 when she died, and today I am 71,” Lansing says. “My passion for it is just as strong, and for all concerned. All cancers are connected. (An advance in) lung cancer might lead to a breakthrough for ovarian cancer.”

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Sherry Lansing.

Advocacy is so important, Lansing knows, as someone who’s lived through it with her mother. She knows that “when you’re diagnosed, it’s so scary, so frightening. You almost don’t hear what anyone is saying. You do research and reach out to the doctor and make sure you are getting the best care for your particular kind of cancer.

“I think all of us have to be an advocate, because cancer touches everyone in some way … We want to make cancer a chronic disease, something that’s been done with so many diseases like polio.”

While the Sherry Lansing Foundation cites cancer research as a focus, it also seeks to create what it calls “encore career opportunities.” She laughs approvingly about the recent “The Intern,” featuring Robert DeNiro as a 70-year-old retiree who returns to the workforce as the assistant for a much-younger female executive.

“That’s a wonderful movie. I have noticed that people, when they turn 55 or 60 or whatever it is, no longer want to retire. They want to be relevant, have meaningful work, paid or unpaid. A segment of the population is being overlooked, being ignored. Ageism is alive and well. Since I left Paramount at 60, I was in the demographic that wants to redefine aging.”

Lansing believes that her generation is uniquely geared for such a proactive plan, as “the generation that marched for civil rights, for the women’s movement. For instance, there’s a shortage of math and science teachers. If you’re young and just graduated from MIT, (schools) might not get you if you’re getting offers of other jobs of $100,000. But when you’re 60, and you already had a successful career, you might love it. A light bulb really went off for me. It’s about how to take this segment who is healthy, living into their 80s, and redefine what a third chapter looks like … boomers are not going quietly in to the night.”

That flexibility and insistence on forging her own path is what made Lansing’s trailblazing possible. Growing up “when there really weren’t any film schools,” her education became sitting in movies every weekend and “getting lost in the magic.”

The easiest way into the business that she could see was as an actress, a path not destined to be long because “first of all, I had no talent, and even more than not being talented, I felt uncomfortable being someone other than myself. I was lucky enough to get cast in a John Wayne movie, and I looked around the set and thought ‘What are all these people doing?’ I never felt good about it.”

Fortunately, Lansing discovered there was a different path behind the camera, beginning with “reading scripts for $5 a script” and then slowly rising up the ranks.

She says that even as the first female studio head, she believes that gender is less an obstacle than the sheer lack of positions available “in a very hard business with a small number of jobs. It requires talent and hard work, and it requires luck.

“We used to call it that the movie god has to shine on you. When I left there were more women than men in that business, but that’s not true anymore. I can’t explain that. It’s just very hard.”

“War is not over when the shooting stops,” says Lois Pope. “For disabled veterans, the sacrifice goes on.”

On Tuesday night, the day before Veterans Day, a Ric Burns documentary underwritten by Pope will be an unflinching reminder of the cost of war paid by the country’s 4 million disabled veterans.

Called “Debt of Honor: Disabled Veterans in American History,” the one-hour film continues the mission Pope began more than 20 years ago when she began lobbying for a disabled veterans memorial in the nation’s capitol.

In October 2014, President Obama helped dedicate the memorial that Pope raised $81 million to build. Pope contributed $10 million of her own money, she said recently from her waterfront Manalapan home, as a few of her 10 cats and dogs played on her dining-room floor.

Pope, the widow of National Enquirer owner Genoroso Pope, is an animal lover who frequently flies animals in danger of being euthanized to no-kill shelters in Palm Beach County.

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‘Debt of Honor’ looks at the history of disabled veterans in America. It airs Tuesday, November 10, 2015 on PBS stations.

But her overriding passion is for America’s disabled vets who have returned from war missing limbs, with post-traumatic stress disorder, and with traumatic brain injuries.

“My cause was to show the real cost of war, the human cost of war,” she said.

The Washington, D.C., memorial was six months from being finished when Pope realized her mission was not.

She contacted six-time Emmy-award winning filmmaker Burns saying she wanted to fund a documentary that showed how the treatment of disabled veterans has changed over the country’s history and how much more could be done.

Burns said Pope’s moral urgency was immediately contagious.

“I’m so grateful to Lois, for her right-between-the-eyes way of talking, for being direct and saying, “So, what about it, buster?,” Burns said. “Talk about putting your money where your mouth is.”

Burns wants his film to open Americans’ eyes to what disabled veterans are enduring. Thanks to modern medicine, soldiers who once would have died on the battlefield are returning alive from Iraq and Afghanistan, but with profound physical and emotional damage. One veteran an hour commits suicide.

“We want to show plainly a reality that’s harrowing,” Burns said. “It’s not easy to look at, but the message is hopeful.”

Well-known disabled veterans appear in the film including Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., who lost both legs and part of an arm as an Army helicopter pilot in Iraq; J.R. Martinez, an Army veteran, actor (and winner of “Dancing With The Stars,”) who was severely burned in Iraq; as well as Vietnam vet Max Cleland, a former U.S. senator and Veterans Affairs administrator.

Scholars and military experts discuss the treatment of wounded soldiers from the Revolutionary War to the battlefield amputations of the Civil War to the shell shock of World War I returnees, which would now be classified as PTSD.

Burns hopes his documentary helps bridge the gap between military and civilian cultures, at a time when only 1 percent of Americans are in military service.

“Because most of us are so remote from military experience, it feels like an option to care or pay attention,” said Burns. “But no matter what war you do or don’t support, you can’t deny that obligation you owe to the men and women who served.”

In previous wars, the wounded were rarely visible in American society because so many died. Today, disabled veterans are living reflections of what war costs. A leg. Both arms. Head trauma. Young bodies forever broken.

“That’s what they gave. We need to see that,” said Burns.

And according to Pope, to understand the consequences of using lethal violence and decide each time whether it’s worth the price.