Lesley Walker obituary

Film editor who made an important contribution to the work of the directors Terry Gilliam and Richard Attenborough

Lesley Walker, who has died aged 80, edited films as lively and varied as Letter to Brezhnev (1985), a salty romantic comedy about two Merseyside women who fall for Soviet sailors; the thriller Mona Lisa (1986), a kind of Soho spin on Taxi Driver; and a pair of escapist, female-led crowd-pleasers revolving around Greek getaways: Shirley Valentine (1989) and the Abba musical Mamma Mia! (2008).

“It was unusual to have a woman editing at that level when Lesley began,” said her friend and former assistant editor, Sue Kingsley. “She was well ahead of the game there.”

Walker was valued highly by two very different UK-based directors: Richard Attenborough, renowned for prestigious historical dramas, and the anarchic surrealist and former Monty Python member Terry Gilliam.

She first worked with Attenborough on Cry Freedom (1987). The film dramatised the friendship between the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (Denzel Washington), who was murdered in police custody, and the journalist Donald Woods (Kevin Kline), who fought to secure an inquest into Biko’s death and was forced to flee the country.

While Cry Freedom was being shot in Zimbabwe, Walker was preparing a rough assembly of the footage flown back to her in London.

“I was very, very nervous about this,” she said. “I took my first few scenes out to Zimbabwe to let [Attenborough] see them privately to find out if I was on the right track. They didn’t have a proper screening room as such, it was just a hut lined with old egg-boxes for sound-proofing.” Attenborough insisted on viewing her footage with an audience: “He had invited everybody and I almost died.”

The response was positive, and she was given free rein with the rest of the picture. “We seemed almost instinctively to agree on the tempo and intensity of sequence after sequence,” Attenborough said.

Her most dramatic contribution to Cry Freedom was to shift Biko’s death from early in the film to the halfway point, thereby reducing though not eliminating the reliance on flashbacks.

“Both Richard and I thought that the flashbacks were great, but there is no getting away from the fact that the audience would know Biko had gone and the emotional content seemed to float out the door,” she said.

Walker received her third Bafta nomination for the film; her previous ones were for the 1981 television miniseries Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years and for Mona Lisa.

She next collaborated with Attenborough on Shadowlands (1993), about the relationship between CS Lewis (Anthony Hopkins), author of the Narnia books, and the poet Joy Davidman (Debra Winger), whom he married following her cancer diagnosis.

It presented Walker with her biggest challenge. “The hardest thing in Shadowlands was in holding back the emotion,” she explained, likening it to “riding a horse, you rein it in a bit and then let it go”. Her initial assembly reduced Attenborough to tears. “He was a total mess at the end of the film, we all were. I still cry at it.”

The tears felt well earned. “Lesley avoided sentimentality,” Kingsley said. “She actually disliked it in films and that made her stand out. She was a toughie. She’d take on directors and tell them what she thought. She wasn’t by any means a pushover. But she had a soothing effect on people, some of them strong, feisty, difficult men. They didn’t shout at Lesley. They respected her.”

Gilliam first hired her on The Fisher King (1991), his warm-hearted mythical buddy movie about a manic, unhoused widower (Robin Williams) and a down-at-heel former DJ (Jeff Bridges).

“I particularly wanted a woman editor, because I wanted a more emotional touch to the film,” Gilliam said. “This was partly to control me, to keep me from going down paths that I’d been down in the past. But I also needed her to support the sides of me that I wanted to reveal in this film. And that’s what Lesley did. She’s got a wonderful sense of character, and she developed an incredibly strong emotional side to the telling of the tale, so I was able to avoid the need to be ‘clever’.”

The Fisher King duly became the sort of film that won over even those viewers previously immune to Gilliam’s eccentric charms.

Walker next cut his adaptation of Hunter S Thompson’s cult novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), starring Johnny Depp and based on the author’s drug-fuelled escapades.

Complications ensued on The Brothers Grimm, with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger in the title roles. Throughout post-production in 2004, Gilliam was at loggerheads with Bob Weinstein, head of Dimension Films, who produced the movie. He repeatedly sent Gilliam and Walker back to the cutting room despite positive reactions at early test screenings. During this lengthy and arduous process, the director briefly put the movie aside in favour of a new project, Tideland, which Walker also edited. Both premiered in 2005.

Her last film with Gilliam was The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), the director’s long-gestating riff on Cervantes, which he had been forced to abandon unfinished in 1998 but which was now revived with Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce.

Walker was born in Wimbledon, south-west London, to Gwyneth (nee Jones) and Frank, who ran a cafe, where Lesley later had a Saturday job. After leaving school at 15, she worked in the electrical department at Woolworths. Having answered a newspaper advertisement, she was employed as a receptionist at Studio Film Labs in London. While there, her range of tasks expanded and she developed an interest in the craft of editing.

She was noticed by the editor John Bloom, and became his assistant on films including Georgy Girl, about the romantic imbroglios of a young Londoner played by Lynn Redgrave, and Funeral in Berlin (both 1966), the second in the series of spy thrillers starring Michael Caine as Harry Palmer.

Walker’s first lead editing job was on Joseph Strick’s adaptation of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977). She went on to edit the western Eagle’s Wing, and Derek Jarman’s version of The Tempest (both 1979), and two films for Mike Leigh: his state-of-the-nation masterpiece Meantime (1983), featuring early performances by Gary Oldman and Tim Roth, and All or Nothing (2002), about the woebegone residents of a south London housing estate, with Timothy Spall, Lesley Manville and James Corden.

She cut two literary adaptations for the director Douglas McGrath – Emma (1996), with Gwyneth Paltrow, and Nicholas Nickleby (2002), starring Charlie Hunnam in the title role. For Stephen Frears, she edited Mary Reilly (1996), with Julia Roberts playing the maid to John Malkovich’s Dr Jekyll.

Walker also cut three further but less distinguished pictures for Attenborough: In Love and War (1996), Grey Owl (1999) and Closing the Ring (2007). Her final film was the comedy-drama Military Wives (2019), with Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan.

The latter-day drift away from film to digital left her unfazed. “A lot of editors of her generation didn’t make the shift from celluloid,” Kingsley said. “But Lesley did. She said, ‘I miss the thinking time you had cutting on film but it’s the same craft.’”

She is survived by a sister.

• Lesley Walker, film editor, born 27 July 1945; died 2 December 2025