It’s doubtful that many of you will recognize the name Anne V. Coates. Such is the lot of a film editor, unknown to all but a handful of film geeks as he or she toils in the shadows of an editing suite, sweating over hundreds of thousands of feet of film (or nowadays, digital image capture), shaping it one cut at a time into something resembling a tightly paced, coherent narrative.

But while you may not know the woman, you’ll certainly recognize some of her work, especially the following, one of the two most famous match cuts in cinema history (the other being the bone becoming a satellite in 2001: A Space Odyssey):

In addition to her fine editing career (Beckett, The Elephant Man, the aforementioned Lawrence of Arabia, Ragtime, Out of Sight, etc.), Coates also was instrumental in the famous restoration of Lawrence of Arabia back in the late 1980s. The story went like this: since its 1962 release, Lawrence had been unceremoniously chopped by 35 minutes from its original 222-minute length. Where the footage had gone to and how it all fit back into the picture was anybody’s guess. (The continuity notes on the 1962 edit had been thrown away.)

Enter film preservationist Robert Harris, who, while assembling the confusing array of lost negative, interpositives and trims, finally reached out to Coates for some direction. As related in Kevin Brownlow’s fine 1996 Lean biography, David Lean, the first thing Coates asked Harris was “Have you found the goggles?” Harris, confused, said, “Goggles?” To which Coates replied, “Yes. The first shot on the film that you’ll be missing is Lawrence’s goggles hanging from a branch.”

And from there it was off to the races, with Coates receiving a consultant credit for what’s considered one of the more important film restorations in the history of cinema.

RIP Ms. Coates!