My friend Don Fairservice, who has died aged 92, was a creative film editor and film-maker. Active in his youth as an actor and set designer with the Mountview Theatre Club in London, he became fascinated by the details of making films, their structures and meanings, and this led to a long career as a editor for the BBC and with numerous directors.
Don edited more than 40 films and TV series, and won a Bafta in 1989 for the Channel 4 series A Very British Coup. Other editing projects included Me and Mrs Jones (2002), The Railway Children (2000), The Scarlet Tunic (1998), Emma (1996), Beautiful Thing (1996), The Hanging Gale (1995) and Chattahoochee (1989).
He wrote and directed a 60-minute film adaptation of Beowulf in 1972, and directed an episode in 1969 for the factual series Cameron Country, featuring the journalist James Cameron, and made several other films, including the documentaries Japanese Journey (2008) and Some Views of New Delhi (2010), for which I composed the scores.
In 2001 he published Film Editing: History, Theory and Practice, “explaining the ‘how’ and especially the ‘why’ of film editing”, as he described it. His knowledge of film history is clear in the book, as is his passion for silent films. He later produced an accompanying three-DVD set, featuring excerpts from more than 70 silent and sound films, with the silents accompanied by the pianist John Sweeney.
Don was born in Friern Barnet, north London, the only child of Lily (nee Montague) and Walter Fairservice, who worked for Gordon & Gotch book distributors. He went to Hornsey county school, and then worked as a clerical assistant (with national service in 1951-53) while acting in amateur drama societies, including 13 years with Mountview. There, in 1961, he made his first documentary film and successfully applied to be a trainee film editor at BBC Television, where he was on staff until 1982, thereafter working as a freelance editor and film-maker until 2012.
During the 1970s he taught at the National Film and Television School and at what is now the Northern Film School in Leeds. In later life he lived in Bristol, where projects included editing Richard Williams’s and Imogen Sutton’s 16-DVD set The Animator’s Survival Kit in 2008, and involvement over many years with Chris Daniels to curate silent film events and short films for the annual Slapstick festival. He generously assisted friends and university students with film-making and editing.
In 2015 Don completed a book entitled The Hitchcock Paradox, though it was never published. The premise was that Alfred Hitchcock “went out of his way to construct his own mythology as a genius with total control over every aspect of his films” without deviating from scripts, but in fact – as Don was able to demonstrate after studying original scripts for Notorious, Marnie, Psycho and other films – Hitchcock created as he went along, often altering the scripted version, including camera shots, along with significant reshoots.
Don married Rosalind Ward in 1962, and they divorced in 1967. His marriage in 1988 to Amanda Hollyer ended in divorce 20 years later. He is survived by Kate, his daughter from a relationship with Pamela Hicks, and a granddaughter, Ellen.
