“Generally speaking, I just cut the way I feel. I like to think I’m an actor’s editor; I go very much by the performances.”
Anne Voase Coates initially wanted to be a film director, an aspiration frowned upon by her uncle, the famed British film entrepreneur J. Arthur Rank, who assumed she was only in it for the glamour and the good-looking actors. But Coates was persistent enough in her passion that Rank eventually found her a job at a production company specializing in religious films. There, Coates learned to project footage, record sound, and splice scenes, and she eventually became an assistant film editor at London’s Pinewood Studios.
Coates received her first editing credit on Noel Langley’s The Pickwick Papers (1952), ten years before cutting the film that won her an Academy Award, David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia (1962). She went on to receive four more Oscar nominations for her work on 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). Her other editing credits include Young Cassidy (1965), The Bofors Gun (1968), The Public Eye (1972), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), What About Bob? (1991), Chaplin (1992), Congo (1995), Striptease (1996), Erin Brockovich (2000), and Unfaithful (2002). Coates remains active in Hollywood, having recently co-edited The Golden Compass (2007) and edited Extraordinary Measures (2010).
