Harold F. Kress

Harold Frank Kress (June 26, 1913 – September 18, 1999) was an American film editor and director. He worked on more than 60 feature films between 1939 and 1978. He won the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for How the West Was Won and again for The Towering Inferno (1974), and was nominated an additional four times.

Kress also worked publicly to increase the recognition of editing as a component of Hollywood filmmaking. He was one-time President of the Motion Picture Editors Guild, and a board member of the American Cinema Editors.

Early life Harold F. Kress was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Samuel Kress and Sophie Siegelman. 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. 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."

Kress worked for thirty years at MGM. Although he directed a few documentaries and made a stab at directing features, his real niche was as an editor, where he was one of the most respected editors in the industry. Ronald Bergan noted that "working as he did in the commercial cinema, he was an adherent of the 'invisible cutting' and 'editing for continuity' school rather than the 'dynamic montage' techniques developed by early Russian cinema or the iconoclastic editing styles derived from the French New Wave."

Personal life Kress was married to Zelda Raphael, and predeceased her. They had one son, Carl, who also became a film editor who shared an Oscar with his father for 1974's The Towering Inferno.

Death After suffering from cancer for a number of years, Kress died in Palm Desert, California, on September 18, 1999, at the age of 86.

Awards and nominations Kress was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1941), Mrs. Miniver (1942), and The Yearling (1947). Kress won his first Academy Award for How the West Was Won (1962). He was nominated again for The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and would win again for the 1974 action film The Towering Inferno with son Carl Kress. Only a handful of editors have received more than Kress' six nominations and two Academy Awards.

He won the Eddie award of the American Cinema Editors for How the West Was Won (1962), and he was nominated for The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). In 1992 he received their Career Achievement Award.