Kay Rose, 80; First Female Sound Editor to Win an Academy Award

Kay Rose, the first woman to win an Academy Award for sound editing -- for her work on the 1984 film “The River” -- has died. She was 80.

Rose died Wednesday in Burbank of multiple organ system failure, said her daughter, sound editor and director Victoria Rose Sampson.

In addition to the Oscar presented 17 years ago, Rose’s 54-year effort to use sound to tell stories was recognized in March with a career achievement award from the Cinema Audio Society. The Motion Picture Sound Editors gave her a similar lifetime achievement award in 1993.

And in October, directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg endowed the Kay Rose Chair in the Art of Sound and Dialogue Editing at the USC School of Cinema-Television. The chair is the first of its kind in the country.

When the endowment was presented Oct. 21, John Williams directed the USC student orchestra in a surprise musical salute to Rose. The sound editor, according to her daughter, declared the evening the best night of her life.

USC cinema Dean Elizabeth Daley praised the gift as a “landmark,” explaining that it has been “so hard to get anyone to pay attention to sound. We’re the only school that teaches sound. And Steven and George are the only guys who would pay this kind of money for sound.”

Although women are still rare in film sound departments, Rose insisted that she never had much trouble getting into the club and that men had been willing mentors.

Her easy access had something to do with timing. After studying film at Hunter College in her native New York, she became a civilian film apprentice for the Army Signal Corps based in Astoria in New York City in World War II. There she helped create such training films as “How to Erect a Double Apron Barbed Wire Fence” and the John Huston documentary “Report from the Aleutians.”

In 1944, she moved to Hollywood with letters of introduction from several professionals with whom she had worked in the Signal Corps. Nevertheless, she remained jobless and was down to her last $5 and ready to ask her family for bus fare home when, as she told Daily Variety in 1997, “I decided to take a streetcar to the Valley and wound up at Universal.

“I went up to the gate and asked the guards if I could call the editorial department for a job as an assistant. They got hysterical with laughter” at her job-seeking methods, she said, “but they let me call anyway. The man on the phone asked if I was any good. I said yes, and he said ‘OK, you’re hired!’ ”

She found out later that she had placed her bold call only half an hour after an editor had fought with and fired his assistant. Because most young men were off fighting the war, no other assistants were available.

Rose got the job, but was a long way from the top.

“I have worked on some of the worst movies you’ve ever imagined,” she said in an interview last year, “but they were low-budget independent films and I learned to do all kinds of things.”

In 1951, she married film editor Sherman Rose and, with him, produced what is now considered a sci-fi cult classic, the 1954 “Target Earth.” They later divorced.

She was sound effects editor for the 1957 film “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein” and in charge of sound effects for two major Western television series: “The Rifleman,” starring Chuck Connors, from 1958 to 1963; and “The Big Valley,” starring Barbara Stanwyck, from 1965 to 1969.

Rose worked her way up to some of the best films, and found herself in demand by the best directors -- Sydney Pollack, Peter Bogdanovich, Robert Altman, Gene Kelly, Martin Scorcese, Alan Pakula, Blake Edwards, Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand and Carl Reiner and, with Mark Rydell, on “The River.”

Among Rose’s sound editing credits are “Comes a Horseman,” “The Rose,” “Ordinary People,” “On Golden Pond,” “California Split,” “Crimes of the Heart,” “The Milagro Beanfield War,” “Black Rain,” “Robocop 2,” “Switch,” “The Prince of Tides,” “For the Boys,” “Blake Edwards’ Son of the Pink Panther” and “Speed.”

“To me, the story rules,” Rose said in a recent interview. “Finding a balance between music and effects that supports the story in the best way possible has always been my focus.

“It was all a lot of fun.... I loved every minute of it.”

In addition to her daughter, Rose is survived by her sister, Patricia Gaffney, and two granddaughters.

Services will be at noon Wednesday in the Hall of Liberty, Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills.

The family has asked that, instead of flowers, memorial contributions be made to the Kay Rose Chair at the USC School of Cinema-Television Sound Department, or to Habitat for Humanity, Providence/St. Joseph’s Foundation or a charity of the donor’s choice.