Film and sound editor known for Alien and Chariots of Fire

Born: November 4, 1933;

Died: April 23, 2019

TERRY Rawlings, who has died aged 85, was a British film and sound editor who was most famous for his work with the director Ridley Scott, earning BAFTA nominations for the classics Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982). With a career which ran from 1955 to 2005, his other most well-known credit was on Chariots of Fire (1981), for which he was nominated for both a BAFTA and an Academy Award.

As a film editor, Rawlings’ career began with Michael Winner’s 1977 horror film The Sentinel and ended with Joel Schumacher’s Gerard Butler-starring adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera in 2004. While the films which gathered the greatest critical and retrospective acclaim came around the same era – they also included the animated Watership Down (1978), the Barbra Streisand vehicle Yentl (1983), and Scott’s underrated, Tom Cruise-starring Legend (1985) – he continued to work at a high level.

Later films include cult Scottish filmmaker Donald Cammell’s thriller White of the Eye (1987), David Fincher’s troubled Alien sequel Alien 3 (1992), Pierce Brosnan’s debut film as James Bond Goldeneye (1995) and the Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones-starring Entrapment (1999). From 1962 to 1977 he was a specialist sound and dubbing editor, working on films including the comedy Bedazzled (1967), Isadora (1968), Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971) and Scott’s debut film The Duellists (1977).

Despite having no ambition to get into the film industry (“I did it because they were going to pay me more than I was earning at the time,” he said), Rawlings got a start in 1955 through a past girlfriend whose brother was Gerry Paulson, the head editor at Rank Screen Services who produced commercials for cinemas. Based at Pinewood Studios in London, he worked as an archivist in the library and earned his all-important union membership, although when a disagreement came up about pay and conditions he moved over to Shepperton Studios.

Here, he took his first job on a feature film as an assistant sound editor – John Mills’ Town on Trial in 1957 – and spent five years as a freelance assistant, including on Stanley Donen’s Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman-starring Indiscreet (1958), working alongside the much-admired Jack Harris, whose work he knew from the films of David Lean. His first lead role as a sound editor was on 1962’s The Pot Carriers, which he won by badgering the director into giving him the job.

For the rest of his career Rawlings was a freelance editor in film, whose stock escalated quickly when he worked on The L-Shaped Room in 1962; he had originally asked about the job and been told his services were not required, but when the original sound editor dropped out, a chance encounter around the studio got him the gig. He also worked in television and commercials, and was in charge of all aspects of sound on the first series of long-running current affairs programme World in Action in 1963.

When Rawlings made the switch to full film editing, it was through a similar coincidence to that of The L-Shaped Room. Having worked on sound on 11 of Michael Winner’s films, he was urgently hired to complete the film edit on The Sentinel when the original editor dropped out midway through.

Once the leap had been made, those who knew Rawlings as a sound editor began to hire him for film editing work. He got the Watership Down gig because the director Martin Rosen had produced Women in Love, and Alien because Scott had been impressed with his inventive sound edit on The Duellists, although it was once again Rawlings who lobbied for this job, after being approached to do the sound edit.

Throughout his career, Rawlings’ long-serving sound mixer was Ray Merrin, and together they made an early stamp on Alien; for the unbearably tense scene in which Harry Dean Stanton’s character looks for Jones the cat amid darkened spaceship corridors, unaware he’s being preyed on himself by the alien, the pair put a cut of the scene together themselves as a suggestion – impressed, Scott decided to go with it unchanged.

As much as a mastery of technical skills were required, Rawlings also had to understand the storytelling art to do his job. Yet because he did not have the relevant American union credentials yet, he was forced to accept a ‘supervising editor’ credit on Blade Runner (there were no other editors) and to work off-lot in an LA hotel room.

“Music has been one of my great loves all my life,” he told the Animated Views website. He said he felt he could edit better than others because they did not consider sound. He edit films subconsciously, he said, he felt the scene instinctively.

Born in London in 1933, Terence ‘Terry’ Rawlings lived in London with his wife of 59 years Louise, and later in Hertfordshire, where he died at home.

DAVID POLLOCK