Marcia Lucas, the Oscar-winning film editor whose work helped shape Star Wars, died Wednesday in Rancho Mirage, California, from cancer. She was 80.
Her death removes one of the clearest behind-the-scenes forces behind a film that became a landmark of American movie-making. Lucas shared the Academy Award for best editing on Star Wars with Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew after the 1977 film won six Oscars, and a contemporary Hollywood Reporter review called the editing “perfectly paced.”
Lucas was born in California under the maiden name Griffin and began her career through the Motion Picture Editors Guild apprenticeship program. She became an assistant to editor Verna Fields, met George Lucas while working with Fields and married him in 1969. She later assisted on THX 1138, edited American Graffiti with Fields and received her first Oscar nomination for that film in 1974.
Her role on Star Wars went well beyond a credit on the poster. George Lucas said she could normally cut a whole reel — all ten minutes of the film — in one week, and that the final battle took her eight weeks because the sequence involved 40,000 feet of dialogue footage from pilots as well as the fighting itself. He also said he came to like the idea of having Darth Vader kill Obi-Wan Kenobi after she suggested it. That influence mattered even if she was not the director and worked mostly out of sight.
Lucas also worked with Martin Scorsese in the mid-70s, editing Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and supervising the edits on Taxi Driver and New York, New York. She later worked again with George Lucas on Return of the Jedi and American Graffiti, keeping her tied to some of the best-known films in his career.
Her family said she would be remembered as a brilliant storyteller, a trailblazer for women in film and a loving mother and grandmother whose humor and sparkle filled every room she entered. What is left unanswered is the specific cancer that took her life, but the scale of her contribution is not in doubt: Marcia Lucas helped shape one of the defining movies of its era, and the credit she earned was only part of the story.
