Alison McDonell
Assistant Editor
Also known by her married name Alison Dyer-Smith.
Alison McDonell was born in Leatherhead, Surrey in 1950 and spent her early childhood in Canada. She is part of a film-making family. Her great uncle was Walter Forde (1898-1984) a director in the British studio system in the 1930s and 1940s, whose wife Adelaide Culley Forde had worked in continuity before becoming Walter’s professional assistant. Alison’s mother Margaret Culley (also known as ‘Wendy Hamlyn’) has worked in continuity and editing at Ealing Studios in the late 1930s, as an editor for Crawley Film in Canada in the 1950s and in the Sound Services of Merton Park Studios (Britain) in the 1960s. Alison’s father Fergus McDonell was a well-known editor and director in Britain, active between 1940 and 1973, and Oscar-nominated for his editing work on Odd Man Out (1947, d. Carol Reed). Fergus’s brother Gordon was a novelist and Hollywood scriptwriter. Alison entered the industry as a trainee assistant editor with De Lane Lee Studios in London in 1968. She worked until the mid-1970s as a freelance editing assistant on a number of feature films including Ooh You Are Awful (1972), and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974) before taking a break to have children. She returned to the industry in the 1980s, working freelance for television companies. In this interview she talks about her family and the formative experience of visiting editing suites and film sets as a child. She also describes entertaining visits from her great uncle and aunt Walter and Culley Forde who played the piano and sang when they visited the family in Canada. She discusses the cutting rooms in Wardour Street (London) in the late 1960s, learning how to run an editing suite and visiting the sound effects library at Elstree Studios. She reflects on the good atmosphere, lifestyle and ‘fun’ of her work and how that compensated for some of the more routine/tedious aspects of her job. She also talks about working as a freelance editor for Tyne Tees in Newcastle in the early 1980s and the challenges of organising childcare.
© Melanie Bell
Interview
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How to cite this page
Women’s Work Oral Histories/Oral Histories/Melanie Bell, Women’s Work in British Film and Television, https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/bectu/Oral Histories,Saturday 4th May 2024.
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