Keith Palmer (film editor)

Keith Palmer (born 1942) is a British film editor, best known for the Sharpe and Hornblower television movies, but active in feature films since the 1960s.

He won a Primetime Emmy Award in 1999.[1]

Palmer began his career in 1962 as dubbing editor on Station Six-Sahara. Through the 1960s into the early 1970s he worked as a sound mixer or editor, on films including 30 Is a Dangerous Age, Cynthia (1967), Shalako (1968), The Strange Affair (1968), Hello-Goodbye (1970) and Wake in Fright (1971). In 1966 he was assistant editor on I Was Happy Here.[2]

Palmer's first work as a full film editor came in 1969, on the first eight episodes of Strange Report, a new television drama series starring Anthony Quayle. His early films as an editor were I Start Counting (1970) and Nothing But the Night (1972), and he was also editor for the BBC television series Doomwatch (1972).[3] Thereafter, Palmer almost invariably worked as editor, several times on films made by Peter Sasdy and Jack Gold. In 1987 an unusual challenge came with Escape from Sobibor.[4]

In 1999 Palmer received the Primetime Emmy Award (Outstanding Single Camera Picture Editing for a Miniseries or a Movie) for Hornblower: The Even Chance (1998),[1] and for the same movie he was also nominated for a BAFTA Television Award (Best Editing, Fiction/Entertainment).[5]

Having edited The Secret Garden (1987), fourteen years later Palmer was called on to work on the sequel Back to the Secret Garden (2001).[6]