[T]here were only certain jobs open to women. Things like hairdressing didn't really interest me. I might have been interested in photography, but wo… - Anne V. Coates

But I was taught, or I must have heard it somewhere, that as it became a more important job, men started to get in on it. While it was just a background job, they let the women do it. But when people realized how interesting and creative editing could be, then the men elbowed the women out of the way and kind of took over.
There were some wonderful women editors who helped inspire me to go into editing in England. In a way, I've never looked at myself as a woman in the business. I've just looked at myself as an editor. I mean, I'm sure I've been turned down because I'm a woman, but then other times I've been used because they wanted a woman editor.

We had mostly pilots in the hospital, [...] and kids who had been playing with bombs they found on the ground and stuff. Pretty harroing, actually but it was intriguing for me just to be meeting other people (en) it opened my mind to communism and things like that which shocked my family.

[Asked: "How did your famous match cut in Lawrence of Arabia — the cut from a close-up of Peter O’Toole blowing out a match to a wide shot of the sun rising over the desert — come about?"] By accident. When we were cutting Lawrence, we were working on film, and so when we were running the sequence, we saw it cut together. Nowadays using digital, you would have done a [dissolve] in the machine, and you never would have seen it cut together like it was. Almost at the same moment, David Lean and I looked at each other and said, "That’s a fabulous cut." He said, "It’s not quite perfect — take it away and make it perfect," and I literally took two frames off the outgoing shot, and that's the way it is today.