Ralph Winters, an Oscar-winning film editor, died on Feb. 26 of natural causes. He was 94.
Born in Ontario, Canada, Winters and his family moved to California in 1918. His father landed a job as a tailor in the wardrobe department at MGM; Ralph was hired by the studio 10 years later to work as an assistant editor. Training with older, more experienced editors, he learned the craft by creating silent versions of movies for theaters that were not yet equipped with sound.
Over the next seven decades, he edited more than 70 movies, including “Gaslight,” “Little Women,” “On the Town,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “The Great Race,” “The Thomas Crown Affair,” “The Front Page,” “Micki & Maude” and “Cutthroat Island.” Winters teamed up with writer/director Blake Edwards on nearly a dozen films, editing classics like “The Pink Panther,” “10” and “Victor/Victoria.” Nominated for six Academy Awards in the best film editing category, he won twice — for “King Solomon’s Mines” in 1950 and “Ben-Hur” in 1959.
In 1951, Winters became a founding member of the American Cinema Editors, the industry’s only honorary society of film editors. Forty years later, he won the ACE’s Career Achievement Award. His autobiography, “Some Cutting Remarks: Seventy Years a Film Editor,” was published in 2001.