Anne Coates
Queen of the cutting room whose credits ranged from Lawrence of Arabia to Fifty Shades of Grey
ANNE COATES, the film editor, who has died aged 92, was the acknowledged queen of the cutting room, winning an Oscar for her work on David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and four Oscar nominations – for Becket (1964), The Elephant Man (1980), In the Line of Fire (1993) and Out of Sight (1998).
Anne Coates began her career in the 1940s as “a sort of tea girl”, at Elstree studios, patching up prints of short religious films before sending them out to the nation’s churches. After getting her union card, she landed a job in the cutting room at Pinewood, and worked her way up, helping to knock Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) into shape before getting her first editor’s credit on The Pickwick Papers in 1952.
Over the years, as editing technology improved, she worked on moviolas and flatbed editing machines, before mastering the digital complexities of Avid’s media composer. Revered for her instinctive mastery of pacing and shot choices, she became the subject of academic analyses of the “Anne Coates style” – a concept about which she claimed to have no clue.
She rounded off her career with Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), when, at the age 89, she sought to inject a little more passion into the relationship between Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, confessing that she had found their kisses “lukewarm”. “I would have had her trussed up like a suitcase and hoisted to the ceiling,” she claimed. But the film makers were worried that they would not get a censor’s rating suitable for wide release, so her idea was not taken up.
Anne Coates got her big break when, on a visit to her local supermarket in Knightsbridge, she bumped into Gerry O’hara, then working as an assistant director, who was screen testing Albert Finney for what would become Lawrence of Arabia, based on TE Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. She asked him whether they had anyone working in the cutting room. Two days later she was offered the job – at £50 a week.
Finney, the director David Lean’s first choice to play Lawrence, was cast but was fired two days into filming for reasons that are still unclear. Recast with Peter O’toole, the epic involved Lean, O’toole and a vast cast and crew in an 18-month trial of endurance in Jordan, Morocco and Spain.
Back at Shepperton Studios, Anne Coates received four-hour lots of footage every four days. She later visited the crew in Spain and Morocco and, when Lean returned to England, the two set up a cutting room in London. For 13 months she snipped and spliced his gargantuan epic into a more manageable four-hour film, later calculating that she had probably cut around 31 miles of footage.
Lean, a distinguished editor himself before he became a director, was an exacting taskmaster and Anne Coates recalled that to begin with she was nervous working for him. But she found him open to ideas and was delighted when he told her: “I don’t think I’ve ever before seen anything cut exactly the way I would have cut it myself.” In a film noted for its great entrances, it was she who persuaded Lean to include the famous wide shot of Peter O’toole and camels riding over the horizon in the final cut.
After Lawrence, Anne Coates found herself in demand in Hollywood, where she eventually moved to live, as well as England, going on to edit dozens of classic films, many of them known for their pace and vigour, including Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965); Murder on the Orient Express (1974); The Eagle has Landed (1976); Chaplin (1992) and
Erin Brockovich (2000). Twenty five years after Lawrence scooped the pool at the Oscars, Anne Coates found herself back in the cutting room, having been invited to work on a restored director’s cut undertaken by Robert Harris and Jim Painten under Lean’s supervision, which was released in 1989.
The film had been chopped a number of times following its initial showing and the restoration reunited Anne Coates with Lean and Peter O’toole in a London dubbing room, where missing dialogue was recorded for the restored soundtrack.
“I think one of the things [Lean] said to me, which I always treasured from when we did the reconstruction, was: ‘I forgot what fun we had in the cutting room,’ and that was true,” Anne Coates recalled. “He taught me to have courage in my cutting and to come up with ideas and never be afraid.”
Anne Voase Coates was born at Reigate, Surrey, on December 12 1925 to Laurence Coates, an architect, and his wife Kathleen, daughter of Joseph Rank, the Methodist founder of one of Britain’s largest flour milling and bakery companies. An uncle, J Arthur Rank, would found Britain’s largest film company, the Rank Organisation, in 1937.
Educated at Bartrum Gables Boarding School for Girls, Broadstairs, Anne had what she called “an overprotected upbringing”. Her first passion was horses and she nurtured dreams of becoming a racehorse trainer. Then she thought she might go into films, but her uncle dismissed the idea. Instead, during the war she put the experience from her schooldays in a Red Cross troop to use as a Voluntary Aid Detachment or VAD nurse, working at Sir Archibald Mcindoe’s pioneering plastic surgery hospital in East Grinstead.
Eventually she managed to persuade her uncle to give her a lowly job in his film empire – though in the part making religious films. “He thought, ‘That’ll cool her down’,” she recalled, adding: “Didn’t work.” She soon heard of a job going at Pinewood for an assistant in the feature film cutting room and went for an interview. “They said, ‘Can you do opticals?’ ‘Oh yes!’ I said.”
Anne Coates went on to edit more than 50 films, ranging from dramas and comedies, and thrillers and fantasies, to musicals. She worked with many of the great directors, from David Lean and Carol Reed to Clint Eastwood and Steven Soderbergh, enjoying having a ringside seat from which to observe the follies and foibles of the profession.
She recalled working on the out-takes of Becket, filmed after its co-stars, Richard Burton and Peter O’toole, had been enjoying what she described as “a bit of noggin”: “On the beach, they were having a real problem sitting on their horses, [and] because they were flubbing their lines, we had to shoot over two days. The clouds are there one day but not the next, and nobody notices that because the actors are so magnetic. The horses were perfectly well behaved, but it was mainly the boys who were trouble.”
Early in her career Anne Coates hoped that editing would serve as a stepping stone to directing. But in the 1950s the industry proved resistant to female directors and, after her marriage in 1958 to the director Douglas Hickox, she decided that one director in the family was enough.
Appointed OBE in 2004, Anne Coates was awarded Bafta’s highest honour, a Fellowship, in 2007 and in 2016 became only the second editor to receive a Lifetime Achievement Oscar (after Margaret Booth in 1978).
A modest woman, Anne Coates never attended an Oscar ceremony until 1980 when she was nominated for The Elephant Man, not wanting it to look as if she thought she was going to win.
Working with David Lynch on the film had been an “unusual” experience: “He said to me one day, ‘You should take the kids to the London Hospital and look at all the freaks in the bottles, the two-headed babies.’ The actual Elephant Man was in there. He said, ‘You’ll really enjoy it. Take some sandwiches and make a day of it.’”
She did not take him up on his suggestion, yet her two sons, Anthony and James Hickox, both became film directors specialising in horror films. They survive her with her daughter, Emma, a film editor, her marriage to Douglas Hickox having ended in divorce.
Anne Coates, born December 12 1925, died May 8 2018