Even if she had only edited David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Anne V. Coates, who has died at the age of 92, would have been assured of her place in screen history. She had received her first credit a decade earlier for Noel Langley’s The Pickwick Papers (1952) and would amass over 50 more during a career that ran through to Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), on which she worked with Lisa Gunning and Debra-Neil Fisher when well into her 80s.
As the niece of J. Arthur Rank, Coates often joked that she had “got into the industry through influence”. But, while she initially harboured ambitions to become a director, she quickly learned her craft in assisting Reginald Mills on projects like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948).
It was her work on Ronald Neame’s The Horse’s Mouth (1958) and Tunes of Glory (1960) that impressed Lean (himself a former editor), along with her knowledge of the French New Wave. They spent weeks together sifting through the 33 miles of footage that Lean had exposed for Lawrence of Arabia, although Coates has said that their most inspired moment – the cut from an extinguished match to the blazing desert sun that supposedly prompted Steven Spielberg to make movies – came about by accident while they were compiling the rough cut.
Despite the rapport that earned them both Oscars, Coates and Lean never worked together again. But further nominations followed for Peter Glenville’s Becket (1964), David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), Wolfgang Petersen’s In the Line of Fire (1993) and Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight (1998). Moreover, Coates also received a BAFTA Fellowship in 2007 and an honorary Academy Award in 2016.
While cutting The Elephant Man, she was forced to juggle the footage to meet producer Mel Brooks’ post-production dictat that John Merrick’s face had to be kept hidden for as long as possible, while she also became one of the first editors to intercut images of an actor from a previous picture when she used frames of Clint Eastwood in Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) in the Love Field sequence in In the Line of Fire.
When not raising her family with director Douglas Hickox, Coates demonstrated her editorial versatility with projects as diverse as Ken Annakin’s Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express (1974), John Sturges’ The Eagle Has Landed (1976), Milos Forman’s Ragtime (1981), Gary Goddard’s Masters of the Universe (1987) and Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin (1992).
She also turned her hand to producing on The Medusa Touch (1978), directed by Jack Gold, who had also called the shots on one of her favourite assignments, The Bofors Gun (1968). But editing remained her métier and, having relocated to Hollywood in 1986, Coates reluctantly made the transition to digital editing on Frank Marshall’s Congo (1995). Typically, she mastered systems like Lightworks and Avid on the likes of Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich (2000), Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (2002) and Chris Weitz’s The Golden Compass (2007). But her first love remained the trusty Moviola.
