Margaret Booth

Margaret Booth was born in Los Angeles in 1898 and entered the movies almost at their birth, joining D.W. Griffith's company as a teenage negative cutter—one of the anonymous women who literally patched strips of film together by hand. Around 1921 she moved to Louis B. Mayer's studio, where the director John M. Stahl mentored her in the art of shaping a scene through the splice, teaching her to feel where a shot should end and the next begin.

When Mayer's operation became MGM, production chief Irving Thalberg recognized that the young cutter was doing something more sophisticated than mechanical assembly. He began calling her a film editor—by most accounts the first time the phrase was applied to anyone—and the title stuck to the whole profession. Booth earned her single competitive Oscar nomination for the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty, and cut some of the studio's most prestigious pictures of the era, among them Camille, Romeo and Juliet and The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

By the late 1930s her authority had grown beyond any single film. As MGM's supervising editor she oversaw the cutting of virtually everything the studio released, a position of quiet, enormous power that she held for more than two decades. Directors and producers deferred to her judgment; a scene did not leave MGM until Margaret Booth was satisfied with it. Her taste—crisp, unfussy, always in service of the story—helped define the seamless classical style of the studio's output.

When MGM's old order collapsed, Booth simply kept working, editing and supervising for producer Ray Stark on films like The Way We Were, The Sunshine Boys and Annie well into her eighties. In 1977 the Academy gave her an honorary award for what it called sixty-two years of distinguished service.

She died in 2002 at the age of 104, having spanned the entire history of the American cinema from Griffith's silents to the modern age. Few people shaped so many films, and fewer still gave a profession its name.