Margaret Booth

Margaret Booth (January 16, 1898 – October 28, 2002) was an American film editor.

Born in Los Angeles, she started her Hollywood career as a 'patcher', editing films by D. W. Griffith, around 1915. Her brother was actor Elmer Booth. Later she worked for Louis B. Mayer when he was an independent film producer. When Mayer merged with others to form Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924, she worked as a director's assistant with that company. She edited several films starring Greta Garbo, including Camille (1936).

Booth later edited such diverse films as Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award). A few films associated with her are Wise Girls (1929), A Yank at Oxford (1938), The Way We Were (1973), The Sunshine Boys (1975), The Goodbye Girl (1977), The Cheap Detective (1978), and Seems Like Old Times (1980). She was supervising editor and associate producer on several films for producer Ray Stark, culminating with executive producer credit on The Slugger's Wife in 1985 when she was 87 years old.

She received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1978 for her work in film editing. She is the second longest-lived person (after Luise Rainer) ever to have been given an Oscar. In 1983 she was awarded the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who, through their endurance and the excellence of their work, have helped to expand the role of women within the entertainment industry.^[1]

In 1990, Booth was honored with the American Cinema Editors Career Achievement Award. She died in 2002, aged 104, from complications of a stroke she suffered. She is interred at Inglewood Park Cemetery, Inglewood California.

Selected filmography

• Bringing Up Father (1928)

See also

• List of centenarians (actors, filmmakers and entertainers)

References

External links

• Margaret Booth at the Internet Movie Database
• Margaret Booth at Women Film Pioneers Project
• Brownlow, Kevin (2002). "Margaret Booth: Tough, unsentimental film editor who began her career 'patching' during the First World War", The Guardian November 2, 2002.
• Gomery, Douglas (2000). "Margaret Booth," in Tom Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (editors), International Dictionary of Film and Filmmakers, Edition 4 (St. James Press), ISBN 978-1-55862-449-8. Online version of article retrieved December 24, 2007.
• Lewis, Kevin (2006). "The Moviola Mavens and the Moguls: Three Pioneering Women Editors Who Had the Respect of Early Hollywood's Power-Brokers", in Editors Guild Magazine, Vol 27, No. 2 (March–April 2006). Archived at WebCite from this original URL 2008-06-22.
• Margaret Booth at Find a Grave
• Literature on Margaret Booth