Harold F. Kress
| Harold F. Kress | |
|---|---|
| Born |
June 26, 1913 Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | September 18, 1999 (aged 86) Palm Desert, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Film editor |
| Years active | 1933–1978 |
| Spouse(s) | Zelda Raphael Kress |
| Children | Carl Kress |
Harold F. Kress (June 26, 1913 – September 18, 1999) was an American film editor with more than fifty feature film credits; he also directed several feature films in the early 1950s. He won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for How the West Was Won (1962) and again for The Towering Inferno (1974), and was nominated for four additional films; he is among the film editors most recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. He also worked publicly to increase the recognition of editing as a component of Hollywood filmmaking.
Harold F. Kress was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Sam and Sophie Kress. The family moved to Los Angeles, where his father ran a restaurant in Hollywood. Kress was studying to become a lawyer at the University of California, Los Angeles until he unexpectedly received an opportunity from Irving Thalberg to work in the editing department at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) film studio.
He worked for three years as an uncredited assistant on The Good Earth (1937). His first credit was for Broadway Serenade (directed by Robert Z. Leonard-1939). In that same year Kress worked on four other films. In the words of Tony Sloman, "MGM was the glamour film factory, the Rolls-Royce of Hollywood, and they put a new movie into production every 10 days. Kress's six (sic) films of 1939 (including Richard Thorpe's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as supervising editor) proved he could work well under pressure and was unfazed by glamour. In 1940 he went on to edit Andy Hardy Meets Debutante, one of Louis B. Mayer's favourite series episodes, Comrade X, starring the studio's pride and joy, the king of Hollywood himself, Clark Gable, and two extremely successful Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy vehicles titled Bitter Sweet and New Moon. The success of these films thrust Kress into the top rank of MGM feature editors."
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