Dede Allen obituary

Innovative American film editor best known for her work on Bonnie and Clyde
Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty in the final scenes of Bonnie and Clyde. The film’s style and constant change of pace had much to do with the editing by Allen, below Photographs: Allstar; Tom Fleischman/AP Allstar

Dede Allen, who has died after a stroke aged 86, not only broke into the predominantly male preserve of film editing, but developed a style and made innovations so distinctive that a school of editing was named in her honour. She was one of the great practitioners of movie-making.

Dede Allen

Yet she worked rarely in Hollywood, did not achieve notable success until the age of 42, and despite receiving several Oscar nominations and the first solo onscreen credit for an editor at the beginning of a film, she was never well known. The job is highly technical and riddled with jargon, yet it is also an art, which is how Allen viewed it.

The film that made her name was Arthur Penn's 1967 hit, Bonnie and Clyde, about the doomed 1930s bank-robbing couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Its style, constant change of pace and excruciatingly violent ending had much to do with Allen's editing, which is copied to this day. She made six films in all with Penn, including Alice's Restaurant (1969), Little Big Man (1970), Night Moves (1975) and The Missouri Breaks (1976).

Allen made a trademark out of following a slow fade-out with a quick cut-in, unorthodox at the time. Another of her innovations was known as prelaps, in which the sound of a subsequent scene is heard just before the picture appears. For years, she had to dissuade sound editors from correcting her "mistake". This and other work led to the term "the New York school", for that is where Allen did most of her work. But the many editors she trained who went on to win recognition also led to the tag "the Dee-doids".

Her first feature film was Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), under the director Robert Wise, who had edited Citizen Kane. After that, she began to accumulate an impressive list. Among them were The Hustler (1962), starring Paul Newman; Rachel, Rachel (1968), Newman's directorial first; Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), from Kurt Vonnegut's book; Serpico (1973), the hit about an undercover New York cop; and The Wiz (1978), a modern Wizard of Oz.

Allen's first Oscar nomination came for the unconventional 1975 drama Dog Day Afternoon, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Al Pacino. The second was for Reds (1981), Beatty's saga of the communist journalist John Reed. Allen also worked on Henry and June (1990), about Henry Miller's tripartite rompings in France; the comic-horror movie The Addams Family (1991); and John Q (2002).

In 1992 she received an offer from Warner Bros to become a creative consultant, and accepted, despite having been fired in the past by Jack Warner himself. During Bonnie and Clyde the volatile studio boss had finally lost patience with Allen's unorthodox editing and dismissed her before the film was finished. Beatty, who produced as well as starred in it, was so impressed with her work he kept her on, paying her salary from his own finances. Allen left Warner in 1997 and returned to editing with Wonder Boys (2000), which earned her a third Oscar nomination.

She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, to a businessman father and actor mother, but at the age of three her sister developed tuberculosis and the pair were sent to Switzerland. Seven years later, Allen rejoined her now widowed mother in the US and after Dominican school, she enrolled at Scripps college, in Claremont, California.

She immediately tried to get into the movies but all she could find was a messenger job at Columbia. She liked to watch editing but was told firmly that, as a girl, she was too weak to hump around the heavy film cans. During the second world war, however, she did manage to find work apprentice editing, until the men returned in 1945.

She then followed her new husband, the documentary producer Stephen Fleischman, to New York, where for 15 years she cut commercials and brought up her two children. She was able to edit only two "quickie" B-movies before joining Odds Against Tomorrow.

Fleischman survives her, along with their son and daughter, Tom and Ramey, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Dorothea "Dede" Carothers Allen, film editor, born 3 December 1923; died 17 April 2010