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Marcia Lucas, the Oscar-winning film editor behind Star Wars and the ex-wife of director George Lucas, has died. She was 80.
Lucas died on Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, California, from cancer.
“Marcia will be remembered as a brilliant storyteller, a trailblazer for women in film, a loving mother and grandmother, a generous host, and a loyal friend whose humor and sparkle filled every room she entered. Her influence on film is indelible, but those who knew her best will remember the way she made life feel more vivid, more beautiful, more fun, and more full of love,” the family said in a statement.
A California native, Lucas (née Griffin) got her start in editing via the Motion Picture Editors Guild apprenticeship program, and eventually became the assistant to lauded female film editor Verna Fields (Jaws, Paper Moon). It was while working with Fields that she met her future husband, then a student in the film school at the University of Southern California, who had also been hired to assist Fields.
Lucas, who married George in 1969, was an assistant editor on George’s feature directorial debut THX 1138.
With Fields, she edited his next film, American Graffiti, earning her first Oscar nomination for best film editing in 1974. William Reynolds took home the trophy that year for his work on The Sting, but Lucas would go on to earn the Oscar for one of Hollywood’s most beloved films and her husband’s biggest hit: Star Wars. Alongside editors Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew, she accepted the Academy Award for best editing from actors Farrah Fawcett and Marcello Mastroianni. The award was one of six Oscars that Star Wars won, including best art direction, sound, score, costume design and visual effects.
The 1977 Hollywood Reporter review of Star Wars made a special mention of the film’s editing, calling it “perfectly paced.” In his biography of the director, Skywalking: The Life And Films Of George Lucas, writer Dale Pollock called the editor her husband’s “secret weapon.”
George credited the editor for the film’s final battle sequence, telling Rolling Stone in 1977, “My wife, Marcia, can normally cut a whole reel — all ten minutes of the film — in one week. I think it took her eight weeks to cut that battle. It was extremely complex and we had 40,000 feet of dialogue footage of pilots saying this and that. And she had to cull through all that, and put in all the fighting as well. Nobody really has ever tried to interweave an actual plot story into a dogfight.”
It was also Lucas who suggested to the director that Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi, played by Alec Guinness. “The more I thought about Ben getting killed the more I liked the idea,” the filmmaker told Rolling Stone. “It made the threat of Vader greater and that tied in with The Force and the fact that he could use the dark side.”
Outside of her then-husband, Lucas worked with lauded filmmaker Martin Scorsese in the mid-70s. She edited Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and supervised the edit on both Taxi Driver and New York, New York.
Lucas went on to edit another Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, which was released in 1983, the year she and George divorced. On Return of the Jedi, George said that his wife was for the “dying and crying,” or the emotional scenes. Return of the Jedi is the final film where Lucas, who later married and divorced artist Tom Rodrigues, is credited as an editor.
“I love film editing,” she said in 1983 to Time Magazine. “I have an innate ability to take good material and make it better, and to take bad material and make it fair.”
She is survived by daughters Amanda Lucas and Amy Soper, as well as her grandchildren.
