Geraldine Peroni

Oscar-nominated film editor on 'The Player'

Geraldine Peroni was the latest in a series of film editors who worked for the Hollywood maverick director Robert Altman. She totalled eight consecutive features for him, beginning as co-editor on the powerful Van Gogh biopic Vincent & Theo (1990, originally a four-hour television mini-series) and recently concluding her relationship with Altman with this year's The Company, a plotless but beautiful fictional look at the lifestyle of the Joffrey Ballet Company, a film which contained exquisite examples of the editor's craft, as realistic ballet sequences were integrated with the slimmest of narratives.

Geraldine Peroni, film editor: born New York 1953; died New York 3 August 2004.

Geraldine Peroni was the latest in a series of film editors who worked for the Hollywood maverick director Robert Altman. She totalled eight consecutive features for him, beginning as co-editor on the powerful Van Gogh biopic Vincent & Theo (1990, originally a four-hour television mini-series) and recently concluding her relationship with Altman with this year's The Company, a plotless but beautiful fictional look at the lifestyle of the Joffrey Ballet Company, a film which contained exquisite examples of the editor's craft, as realistic ballet sequences were integrated with the slimmest of narratives.

Peroni was born in Manhattan, New York, in 1953 and grew up in Rockaway Beach, Queens, an early professional job being that of a New York cab driver. She took the New York City firefighters examination in 1977, the first year that women were allowed. Inspired by another cab driver, a woman film editor filling in between cutting jobs, Peroni enrolled at Hunter College. She took classes in film and managed to get work as an editing apprentice on the long- gestating adaptation of Grace Paley's Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, a largely unseen 1983 film which consisted of three separate stories about New York women, good technical training for cutting the interconnecting multi-layered strands of Altman movies.

John Sayles was writer on Enormous Changes and Peroni went on to assist in the cutting room on Sayles's labour epic Matewan (1987), which led to her assisting the Academy Award- winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker twice on Martin Scorsese- directed vehicles: the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and the "Life Lessons" segment of the portmanteau New York Stories (1989).

The following year Peroni achieved co-editor status on the little-seen family movie Iron & Silk (1990), a gem about an American teacher studying martial arts in China. This led indirectly to her co-editing Vincent & Theo for Altman. They established an excellent working relationship and she achieved an Academy Award nomination for editing their next collaboration, the Hollywood-based black comedy The Player (1992), losing the award to Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.

The Player is a marvellous example of collaborative editing, Peroni matching Altman's tone with exactitude. Early on, a cut from a zoom-in to the gun in Humphrey Bogart's hand on a postcard sent to Tim Robbins is perfectly successively matched with what appears to be a black frame, in which a reveal shows that it's an open drawer in which the postcard has been placed. Another felicitous sequence is the one in the Pasadena police station, where the Robbins character is arraigned as Lyle Lovett swats a fly and Whoopi Goldberg and her associates ridicule Robbins with laughter. This is beautifully edited; well-shot, too, but the rhythm is built in the cutting.

Peroni could be ruthless, also. Cut from The Player are scenes including the guest stars Patrick Swayze and Jeff Daniels. As Altman himself said in a recent interview in the Director's Guild of America magazine, "It gets to the point where I could be shooting a scene and a little bird will jump in my ear and say, 'Gerri's not going to like this.' "

Peroni continued the relationship with Altman on Short Cuts (1993), Prêt-à-Porter (1994) and Kansas City (1996), all multi-layered portmanteau movies of varying success, and the more straightforward, though inferior, narratives of The Gingerbread Man (1998) and Dr T and the Women (2000). Some think The Company (2004) evinced a return to form.

Other editing credits were notable: Tim Robbins's Cradle Will Rock (1999, with the "Player" himself turned director); Nora Ephron's Michael (1996); Tom deCillo's Johnny Suede (1991), the movie that "broke" Brad Pitt as a lead. Peroni also edited episodes of the HBO television series The Wire.

She was an editor who made the successful crossover in editing techniques, from working classically on film assisting the great Schoonmaker, herself one of the last converts to Avid, to editing directly onto electronic equipment, facilitating the editing of multiple-camera shoots, as favoured by a director like Robert Altman. Much of the exquisite cutting in The Company is from multi-camera sources.

Peroni was working on Ang Lee's new film Brokeback Mountain, which started shooting in May, when she was found dead at her home in New York City.

Tony Sloman