Marcia Lucas, the ex-wife of George Lucas and the Oscar-winning editor of the original Star Wars, has passed away at 80. Marica passed away after a battle with cancer in Rancho Mirage, California. Marcia Lucas has an extensive editing filmography. In addition to her Oscar-winning work on Star Wars, Marcia also worked with her ex-husband on several films, including THX 1138, American Graffiti, and Return of the Jedi. She also worked with Martin Scorsese, editing his early film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
Marcia’s editing career began when working as an assistant editor for Verna Fields, the Oscar-winning editor of films like Jaws and Paper Moon. It was during this experience that Marcia met George Lucas, who at the time was a student at the University of Southern California and had also been hired as Fields’s assistant. Marcia Lucas and Verna Fields would then go on to co-edit Lucas’s American Graffiti together, which earned them both an Oscar nomination for Best Film Editing.
Fields expressed her love of editing many times in her lifetime, saying once in a 1983 Time Magazine interview, “I love film editing. I have an innate ability to take good material and make it better, and to take bad material and make it fair.”
Marcia Lucas is survived by her ex-husband, George Lucas, whom she divorced in 1983, her two daughters, Amanda Lucas and Amy Soper, and her grandchildren. We at mxdwn send out our condolences to the Lucas Family.
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