Biography
Dorothy Spencer was an American film editor whose career spanned more than fifty years and included seventy-five feature film credits. She began working in the industry in the mid-1920s, joining the editorial department at Fox after earlier employment at a film laboratory.
She co-edited Stagecoach (1939) with Otho Lovering for director John Ford and later edited further Ford films including My Darling Clementine (1946). Spencer worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Lifeboat (1944), with Ernst Lubitsch on To Be or Not to Be (1942) and other titles, and with Elia Kazan on A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). Her other credits include Cleopatra (1963), Von Ryan's Express (1965) and Earthquake (1974).
Spencer received four Academy Award nominations for Best Film Editing, for Stagecoach, Decision Before Dawn (1951), Cleopatra and Earthquake. She was awarded the American Cinema Editors Career Achievement Award in 1989. She retired in 1979.
