| Dorothy Spencer | |
| Birthname: | Dorothy M. Spencer[1] |
| Birth Date: | 3 February 1909 |
| Birth Place: | Covington, Kentucky, U.S. |
| Death Place: | Encinitas, California, U.S. |
| Occupation: | Film editor |
| Yearsactive: | 1929–1979 |
| Family: | Jeanne Spencer (sister) |
Dorothy Spencer (February 3, 1909 – May 23, 2002), known as Dot Spencer, was an American film editor with 75 feature film credits from a career that spanned more than 50 years.[2] Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing on four occasions, she is remembered for editing three of director John Ford's best known movies, including Stagecoach (1939) and My Darling Clementine (1946), which film critic Roger Ebert called "Ford's greatest Western".[3]
Spencer was born in Covington, Kentucky in 1909. She entered the film industry at age 15 when she joined Consolidated-Aller Lab in 1924. She moved to Fox, becoming a member of the editorial department. Worked at First National Studios assisting editors including Louis Loeffler and Irene Morra. At Fox, she and Loeffler were part of an editorial team that also included, at one time or another, Barbara McLean, Robert Simpson, William Reynolds and Hugh S. Fowler.
In the 1940s, Spencer edited Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Lifeboat (1944); the latter featured a particularly feisty and well-edited Tallulah Bankhead performance. Spencer edited four films with director Ernst Lubitsch, commencing with To Be or Not to Be (1942), and now considered "one of film's great farces",[4] and concluding with Lubitsch's last, posthumous credit That Lady in Ermine (1948). Spencer also edited director Elia Kazan's feature film debut, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945).
Spencer edited the disaster film Earthquake (1974), which was the last of her eight collaborations with director Mark Robson.
Varietys Eileen Kowalski notes that, "Indeed, many of the editorial greats have been women: Dede Allen, Verna Fields, Thelma Schoonmaker, Anne V. Coates and Dorothy Spencer."[5] Spencer was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Film Editing for Earthquake, which was her fourth and final nomination. It followed her nomination for what still reigns as the most expensive movie ever made, Cleopatra (1963).
Spencer had previously been nominated for Decision Before Dawn (directed by Anatole Litvak, 1951) and, with Otho Lovering, for Stagecoach (directed by John Ford, 1939). Spencer was awarded the American Cinema Editors Career Achievement Award in 1989, and was among the first four editors to receive the Award.
She retired to Encinitas, California. She had disconnected from Hollywood so much that her death, decades later, was not noted in the press of the time.[6]
This filmography is based on the listing at the Internet Movie Database.