Top 100 Greatest Film Editors of All Time

Thelma Schoonmaker was born on 3 January 1940 in Algiers, Algeria. She is an editor and producer, known for The Departed (2006), The Irishman (2019) and Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). She was previously married to Michael Powell.

Michael Kahn was born on 8 December 1930 in New York City, New York, USA. He is an editor and cinematographer, known for West Side Story (2021), Minority Report (2002) and Jurassic Park (1993).

Thrice Oscar-winning editor Daniel Mandell started out in show business as one of "The Flying Mandells" with Ringling Brothers Circus. He then turned his acrobatic skills to performing on the vaudeville circuit. Following service with the Marines in World War I and subsequently taking part in the post-Armistice occupation, he joined a longtime friend in the editing department of MGM. For five years he plied his trade with Columbia (1924-29), before his career really took off after being hired by independent film maker Samuel Goldwyn (at RKO: 1930-1932 and 1941-1952; at United Artists: 1936-1940). Mandell quickly became Goldwyn's number one editor and was assigned the lion's share of prestige pictures: Dodsworth (1936), Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939) (his own personal favorite), The Westerner (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Guys and Dolls (1955). Mandell considered timing to be of paramount importance in his work and believed that his performing background had given him an vital insight into audience reaction.

Mandell's other fruitful collaboration was with the director Billy Wilder, for whom he worked on five films, notably Witness for the Prosecution (1957), The Apartment (1960) and The Fortune Cookie (1966).

New York-born William Reynolds was a self-effacing editor with a distinguished sixty-year career in the motion picture industry, noted for his unobtrusive, seamless work on movies of every genre, from romantic melodramas to gangster films. A graduate of Princeton University, he started in the business, moving props as part of the 20th Century Fox swing gang. Displaying a keen interest in the art of editing, he was taken under the wing of the experienced Robert L. Simpson, whom he accompanied to Paramount as assistant in 1935. After just two years, Reynolds was promoted to full editor, his most prestigious assignment being Algiers (1938). In 1942, he moved across to 20th Century Fox, but wartime service put a temporary halt to his career. However, he did manage to sustain continuity by editing U.S. Army training films.

From 1946, Reynolds was part of a top-notch editing team assembled by Darryl F. Zanuck, himself a former editor and famous for his hands-on approach to post-production. During the remainder of his tenure at Fox, Reynolds cut some of the studio's best films, including the excellent sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951); and glossy romances and musicals like Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955). Reynolds was a frequent collaborator and preferred editor for directors like Robert Wise and Joshua Logan. He did some of his most acclaimed work after free-lancing for three years, back at Fox, on The Sound of Music (1965) -- winning an Oscar and caustically commenting, "when in doubt, cut to Julie Andrews" (NY Times, July 22 1997)). Free-lancing again from 1970, he edited the first half of The Godfather (1972) (Francis Ford Coppola assigned the second half to Peter Zinner) and The Sting (1973) (which Reynolds regarded as one of his most demanding assignments). However, towards the end of his career, he was also involved in several significant commercial failures: Heaven's Gate (1980) -- on which he also acted as executive producer, Pirates (1986) and Ishtar (1987). In 1977, Reynolds was named by his peers in a Film Comment poll as one of the three best-ever film editors.

Ralph Dawson was born on 18 April 1897 in Westboro, Massachusetts, USA. He was an editor and director, known for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Anthony Adverse (1936) and The High and the Mighty (1954). He died on 15 November 1962 in Woodland Hills, California, USA.

William A. Lyon was born on 21 January 1903 in Texas, USA. He was an editor, known for From Here to Eternity (1953), The Caine Mutiny (1954) and Picnic (1955). He died on 18 March 1974 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Educated at UCLA, Harold F. Kress entered the film business in the late 1930s as an editor. Although he directed a few documentaries and made a stab at directing features, his real niche was as an editor, and he became one of the most respected editors in the industry, winning an Academy Award for editing How the West Was Won (1962) and another for The Towering Inferno (1974).

Ralph Winters and his wife Teddy have five grandchildren. He is a two-time Academy Award-winning editor, an incredibly intelligent, kind, unique and loving man who began using a computer when in his 90s and lived to see the publication of his memoirs, "Some Cutting Remarks: Seventy Years a Film Editor", which he wrote on his own PC. He was highly admired and sought-after by up-and-coming editors for his advice and experience, and always gave of himself to these young people. An interviewer once asked him whether he would someday enjoy directing movies. His answer: "You betcha". Ralph E. Winters was incredibly loved and is desperately missed.

Ms. McLean was a pioneering female film editor for 20th Century Fox. She began her Hollywood career in the 1930s and earned her first film credit for editing The Affairs of Cellini (1934). She joined Fox in 1935 as one of only eight female film editors working in Hollywood in the 1930s. She became Fox' editing division chief in 1949 and retired from the studio in 1969.

Joe Hutshing can definitely be included among the greatest film editors of all time due not only to his impressive resume with works from directors like Oliver Stone, Cameron Crowe and Nancy Meyers but also due to his innovative techniques and amazing eye for details in order to compose a great cinematic story.

His partnership with Oliver Stone is one of his most rewarding and the one that lasted the longest. They collaborated in seven films: Wall Street (1987), Talk Radio (1988), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), JFK (1991), The Doors (1991), W. (2008) and Savages (2012). He won Academy Awards in the Best Editing category for two of his Stone works, Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and the outstanding production JFK (1991) - which along with Pietro Scalia they edited down an epic 4-hour epic in the matter of one month. This amazing task also earned them a Bafta and the American Cinema Editors award - of which later Hutshing would become a member. Hutshing would get two other Oscar nominations for Jerry Maguire (1996) and Almost Famous (2000), both directed by Cameron Crowe. He also won an Emmy for editing Live from Baghdad (2002) for director Mick Jackson.

Other credits include: Indecent Proposal (1993), The River Wild (1994), Broken Arrow (1996), Meet Joe Black (1998), Something's Gotta Give (2003), The Holiday (2006), Lions for Lambs (2007), Metallica Through the Never (2013), Aloha (2015), Crown Heights (2017), Robin Hood (2018) and Metallica - S&M2 (2019).

Though he's cut celluloid for some of the best in the business, chances are many film lovers wouldn't even recognize the name Pietro Scalia in a lineup of Hollywood's best film editors. Born in Sicily in 1960, Scalia resided in Switzerland before heading to Los Angeles to continue his education. After receiving his M.F.A. in Film and Theater Arts from U.C.L.A. in 1985, Scalia began his career as an assistant editor to Oliver Stone on such features as Wall Street (1987) and Talk Radio (1988). Later coming into his own with such films as JFK (1991) (for which he received a Best Editing Oscar) and Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead (1995), Scalia continued to work on such high-profile films as Stealing Beauty (1996) and G.I. Jane (1997). Scalia also received Best Editor Oscar nominations for Good Will Hunting (1997) and Gladiator (2000), though he would have to wait until the following year for his next win at the Oscars, as he received the Best Editing Award for director Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001).

Walter Murch has been editing sound in Hollywood since starting on Francis Ford Coppola's film The Rain People (1969). He edited sound on American Graffiti (1973) and The Godfather Part II (1974), won his first Academy Award nomination for The Conversation (1974), won his first Oscar for Apocalypse Now (1979), and won an unprecedented double Oscar for Best Sound and Best Film Editing for his work on The English Patient (1996). Most recently he helped reconstruct Touch of Evil (1958) to Orson Welles' original notes, and edited The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Mr. Murch was, along with George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, a founding member of northern California cinema. Mr. Murch has directed --Return to Oz (1985) -- and longs to do so again, but as an editor and sound man he is one of the few universally acknowledged masters in his field. For his work on the film "Apocalypse Now (1979)", Walter coined the term "sound designer", and along with colleagues such as Ben Burtt, helped to elevate the art and impact of film sound to a new level.

Conrad Nervig had the distinction of being the first-ever recipient of an Academy Award for best editing. This was for Eskimo (1933), a drama shot in semi-documentary style by outdoor and action specialist W.S. Van Dyke in the northernmost inhabited settlement in Alaska. The entire dialogue was in an Inuit language and subtitles were used in translation. The South Dakota-born Nervig had started in the industry with Goldwyn Pictures in 1922 and remained after the merger with Metro, spending his entire career at MGM until his retirement in 1954. He worked on many classic films across diverse genres, including A Tale of Two Cities (1935), Maytime (1937), The Big Store (1941) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). He won a second Oscar for King Solomon's Mines (1950) in collaboration with Ralph E. Winters.

Here is an interesting footnote to Nervig's life: as a naval officer en route to Rio (where he was assigned as a replacement aboard the U.S.S. Glacier), Nervig was a passenger on the ill-fated collier U.S.S. Cyclops during her penultimate voyage. The ship disappeared without trace in March 1918 in the Bermuda Triangle, along with 306 crew and passengers. Fifty-one years after the event (in 1969), Nervig published his recollections -- entitled "The Cyclops Mystery" -- in "The Naval Institute Proceedings".

Gene Milford was an American film and television editor. Among his most noted films are Lost Horizon (1937), On the Waterfront (1954), Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957), Splendor in the Grass (1961), and Wait Until Dark (1967).

Milford won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for Lost Horizon (with Gene Havlick) and for On the Waterfront; he was also nominated for an Academy Award for One Night of Love (1934). A member of the American Cinema Editors, he and Barbara McLean received its inaugural Career Achievement Awards in 1988.

Arthur Robert "Artie" Schmidt began in films as assistant editor to Dede Allen and Jim Clark. His father, Arthur P. Schmidt, had also been a distinguished veteran in the field of film editing, acclaimed for his collaborations with Billy Wilder on masterpieces like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Some Like It Hot (1959). He was somehow disparaging about his son following in his footsteps. Schmidt Jr. instead attended Santa Clara University, graduated with a Bachelor in English and later went on to teach English in Spain. However, following his father's sudden death from a heart attack in 1965, he was recruited by Paramount as an apprentice, and, in 1970, began his professional career as assistant editor. Five years later, he was tasked to cut the running sequences in John Schlesinger's stylish thriller Marathon Man (1976) in the capacity of associate editor under the auspices of his mentor Jim Clark. From there, he progressed to fully-fledged editor in 1977.

Schmidt varied his editing methodology according to each individual project. His motto was "I always try to let the film and story tell me where to go next." Arguably his best work was for the director Robert Zemeckis. This included both films for which he won Best Editing Oscars, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Forrest Gump (1994), as well as the Back to the Future (1985) trilogy and the black comedy Death Becomes Her (1992). Who Framed Roger Rabbit may well have constituted his toughest career challenge as it required a flawless blending of hand-drawn animation with live action scenes. Schmidt said about his successful collaboration with Zemeckis in a 2014 interview "He's wonderful directing actors and great in the editing room. We always seemed to be in sync."

Schmidt's other contributions of note have included Ruthless People (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003). In 2009, he was awarded the American Cinema Editors Career Achievement Award, fittingly presented to him by Robert Zemeckis.

Angus Wall graduated from Bowdoin College in 1988. In 1992, he and Linda Carlson started the firm Rock Paper Scissors, which has become "a respected West Hollywood creative editorial house known for its commercial work for such clients as BMW, HP, and Nike."

Angus is a film editor who has won the Academy Awards for Film Editing twice in a row, both for David Fincher movies (The Social Network and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). His very first Academy nomination was for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, also a David Fincher movie. Angus often works together with Kirk Baxter.

Kirk Baxter was born in 1972 in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. He is an editor and producer, known for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), The Social Network (2010) and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008).

Fredric Steinkamp was born on 22 August 1928. He was an editor and producer, known for Tootsie (1982), Out of Africa (1985) and Three Days of the Condor (1975). He died on 20 February 2002 in Santa Monica, California, USA.

After harrowing experiences as a nurse at Sir Archibald McIndoe's pioneering plastic surgery hospital in East Grinstead, Anne Coates started to fulfil her long-held ambition to be a film director with a company called Religious Films. The work consisted of patching up prints of devotional shorts before sending them out to Britain's churches. This led to a job in the cutting room at Pinewood, where she worked on "The Red Shoes" among others before achieving her first screen credit with "The Pickwick Papers".

William Goldenberg was born on 2 November 1959 in the USA. He is an editor and director, known for Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Argo (2012) and Miami Vice (2006).

American film editor who occasionally directed, but won Oscars in his primary field. The son of Harry W. Gerstad, silent film cinematographer, Harry Donald Gerstad grew up in Hollywood. In his late teenage years he got work as a laboratory assistant at Hal Roach Studios, then Warner Bros., and finally at Republic Pictures.

Following the Second World War, he began editing feature films at RKO, working frequently with director Edward Dmytryk, who mentored Gerstad and helped him find work. In 1949 Gerstad was hired by Stanley Kramer as editorial supervisor and moved to Kramer's unit at Columbia Pictures. He won an Academy Award for his editing of Champion (1949) and shared the Oscar with Elmo Williams for High Noon (1952). He was one of several Kramer staff to work on the TV series Adventures of Superman (1952), and directed episodes as well as editing them. In the 1960s he worked for Bing Crosby Productions and 20th Century-Fox as editorial supervisor, as well as for John Wayne's Batjac Productions. He retired in 1973 and lived the remainder of his life in Palm Springs, where he died in 2002 at 93.

Paul Weatherwax was born on 8 July 1900 in Sturgis, Michigan, USA. He was an editor and director, known for The Naked City (1948), Exclusive (1937) and Men on Call (1930). He died on 13 September 1960 in West Hollywood, California, USA.

Anne Bauchens was a pioneering film editor who had a long-standing partnership with director Cecil B. DeMille. In fact, she first edited a DeMille film in 1915 and then edited all of his films for 38 years, beginning with We Can't Have Everything (1918) and ending with The Ten Commandments (1956). She was nominated for four Oscars and won one, for North West Mounted Police (1940).

James E. Newcom was born on 29 August 1905 in Wayne, Indiana, USA. He was an editor and producer, known for Gone with the Wind (1939), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and Rebecca (1940). He died on 6 October 1990 in San Diego, California, USA.

American motion picture editor, who, in 1977, was voted by 100 of his peers as the best his profession had ever produced. Hornbeck began his distinguished career in the industry, aged fourteen, as a film winder with the New York Motion Picture Company on 42nd Street and Broadway. In 1916, he joined Mack Sennett's Keystone Film Company and worked for twelve years as chief editor on numerous two-reel comedies. In 1934, Hornbeck went to England and became supervising editor for Alexander Korda's London Films, where he worked on such classics as The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934), Things to Come (1936) and The Thief of Bagdad (1940). He was known to be a meticulous craftsman, always wearing white gloves on both hands when handling celluloid.

In 1941, Hornbeck returned to America to collaborate with Frank Capra on the 'Why We Fight' series of documentaries in the Army Signal Corps Photographic Unit. After the war, he edited Capra's classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and MGM's State of the Union (1948). From 1949 to 1953, he was under contract to Paramount and won an Academy Award in for A Place in the Sun (1951). His other outstanding contributions during this decade include Shane (1953), The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and Giant (1956), in which his editing effectively disguised James Dean's untimely demise prior to completion of the picture.

After briefly free-lancing, Hornbeck joined Universal as supervising editor in 1960 and remained in that capacity until his retirement in 1976.