Oscar-winning British-born film editor Anne Coates dies at 92

Her best-known work was the 1962 epic “Lawrence of Arabia”

Anne Coates, a British-born film editor who won an Oscar for her work in making the 1962 desert epic “Lawrence of Arabia,” one of the most visually stunning films in history, died May 8 at a retirement facility in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 92.

Her death was announced by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Coates spent more than 60 years in one of the film industry’s most important but least understood jobs, working alongside such directors as Sidney Lumet, Milos Forman, David Lynch and Steven Soderbergh. Her final credit was on the sexually charged 2015 film “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

“There are lots of really good editors,” Sir Carol Reed, the director of “The Third Man” and other films, said of Coates, “but I have never had one with so much heart.”

A film editor takes raw footage and pieces it together, matching it with sound and music, to create the pace, sequencing and flow of a movie. Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch once described the job to NPR as “a cross between a short-order cook and a brain surgeon.”

Coates worked as a nurse before her uncle, British studio chief J. Arthur Rank, helped find her a filmmaking job in the 1940s — working behind the scenes on religious films.

At the time, film editing was considered an unglamorous technical job that was often filled by women.

“When I tried to get into the industry, there were only certain jobs open to women,” Coates told the Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “Things like hairdressing didn’t really interest me. I might have been interested in photography, but women couldn’t do that in those days. I found the most interesting job a woman could do, other than acting, was editing.”

Her first credit as a film editor came in 1952 with “The Pickwick Papers,” a retelling of the Charles Dickens novel. Her best-known work was for “Lawrence of Arabia.”