Ralph E. Winters

Career overview

Ralph Ethan Winters was a Canadian-born film editor, born on June 17, 1909, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, who grew to become a leading figure in the American film industry. He began his career in the early 1940s working on a series of B movies, which included several entries in the Dr. Kildare series. His first major film project was George Cukor's Victorian chiller, Gaslight, released in 1944. Over his long career, Winters accumulated 74 known credits as an editor.

Winters won two Academy Awards for Best Film Editing. His first win was for King Solomon's Mines in 1950, shared with Conrad A. Nervig, and his second was for Ben-Hur in 1959, shared with John D. Dunning. He also received four additional Academy Award nominations for his work on Quo Vadis in 1951, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in 1954, The Great Race in 1965, and Kotch in 1971. Among his other film credits was On the Town in 1949.

In his personal life, Winters and his wife Teddy had five grandchildren. He lived to be 94 years old, passing away on February 26, 2004. In his later years, he began using a computer when he was in his nineties and lived to see the publication of his memoirs titled Some Cutting Remarks: Seventy Years a Film Editor, which he wrote.