Academy Award winning editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, whose innovative work and great ability with her craft have received recognition and acclaim since the early days of her career, makes a point of saying that "Martin Scorsese and I collaborate on the editing of his movies. And he taught me everything I know about editing. He is a great editor."

Ms. Schoonmaker's and Mr. Scorsese's professional collaboration and friendship goes back to the early 1960s when Mr. Scorsese was a student at New York University, and Ms. Schoonmaker was enrolled in a six-week summer course at NYU's film school. The head of the film department asked her to assist Mr. Scorsese on the editing of a short film. Since then, most of her editing work has been on Martin Scorsese's films, helping him to realize his filmmaking vision with her great editorial eye, style and talent.

Not long after they first met, she was editing Mr. Scorsese's first feature Who's That Knocking at My Door? (1968). In 1981 she won the Academy Award and BAFTA Award (the "British Academy Award") for her editing of Mr. Scorsese's film Raging Bull, starring Robert De Niro. Since then, she has worked on most of the films directed by Mr. Scorsese, including The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, the "Life Lessons" segment of New York Stories, GoodFellas, which earned her another BAFTA Award and another Oscar® nomination, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, Casino, Kundun, and Bringing Out the Dead. She is currently working on Mr. Scorsese's documentary about Italian Cinema Il Dolce Cinema.

Ironically, Ms. Schoonmaker's first major recognition came with her nomination for an Academy Award for Best Editing for the ground-breaking documentary Woodstock (1970), directed by Michael Wadleigh, who she also met when she was at NYU. Her use in Woodstock of techniques such as multiple images and freeze frames complemented the music, were a significant factor in the appeal of the film, and helped to raise documentary filmmaking to a new level.

In addition to winning the Best Editing Oscar® for Raging Bull and her two other Academy Award nominations, Ms. Schoonmaker has also received BAFTA Best Editing Award nominations for Cape Fear and The King of Comedy. She is also the winner of the American Cinema Editors Eddie award for her work on Raging Bull and the recipient of Eddie award nominations for Casino and GoodFellas.

Thelma Schoonmaker was born in 1940 in Algiers, and grew up on the Caribbean island of Aruba, where her father worked for the Standard Oil Company and her mother ran a nursery school. The family moved back to the United States, to New Jersey, when Ms. Schoonmaker was a teenager. She attended Cornell University, where she studied political science and Russian, with the intention of becoming a diplomat. After graduation she decided against going into that field and enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University in New York. While there, she answered a New York Times ad offering training as an assistant film editor. That experience led her to enroll in the film course at NYU where her lifelong love of film editing and collaboration with Martin Scorsese had their beginnings.

Through Mr. Scorsese, Ms. Schoonmaker met and subsequently married the renowned British filmmaker Michael Powell, director of such classics as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. Mr. Powell died in 1990, and Ms. Schoonmaker now works continuously to promote the films and writings of her late husband.

Thelma Schoonmaker's Filmography