Ann Chegwidden, who has died aged 86, was one of the outstanding film editors of her generation. She moved easily between cinema and television, cutting the 1964 version of The Masque of the Red Death for Roger Corman, and in 1974 winning an Emmy for Jane Goodall's documentary, The Baboons of Gombe.
Born in Hampstead, north London, she was the only child of a mother who had studied at the Royal College of Music and a senior civil servant father; they divorced, bitterly, when Ann was only 13. She went to South Hampstead high school and began to read economics at London University, but her parents could not afford the fees.
During the second world war, she inspected Spitfires to check they were safe. Dashing, witty and intelligent, she joined the rush for Paris after the war, falling in love not only with the city but also with the leading theatrical goddess of the day, Edwige Feuillère (obituary, November 17 1998) - an affair that lasted, apparently, for several years.
Breaking into a movie craft discipline for a young woman was exceptionally hard, but on her return to London Ann was so determined that she would literally sweep the cutting-room floor. She is first recorded as assistant sound editor (uncredited at the time) on The Perfect Woman (1949), and as assistant editor on the Boulting brothers' celebrated Seven Days to Noon (1950) - a nightmare, since the brothers did all their own editing. A long apprenticeship on successful, but more or less routine, assignments ended in 1962 with The Dock Brief, from John Mortimer's play.
Two years later she cut her best-known feature, the stylish and stratospherically high-camp The Masque of the Red Death. One of her jobs was to cut the film so that Hazel Court really did look as though she was being pecked to death by ravens hallucinating the male soloists of the Ballets Russes. Another was to work with young cameraman Nicholas Roeg to disguise the fact that Corman's Masque had been shot on the same gothick panto studio set recently used to film Becket.
Ann came into her own with documentaries. Visual storytelling was her great skill, and she worked late into the night until she had found the best narrative possible from the unshaped film at her disposal. Colleagues remember her as a perfectionist - and the generous supplier of whisky at the end of a long day. She was exceptionally observant: editing a Goodall film about chimpanzees, she identified each animal and would never use the wrong chimp for a cheap effect.
Her proudest achievement was as supervising editor on The Heart of the Dragon (1985), Peter Montagnon's spectacular series of 12 episodes shot for Channel 4. This entered deep into areas of the country and Chinese life unseen by western film-makers since the revolution. She was nominated for a Bafta, her previous nominations being for Simon Trevor's Bloody Ivory (1978) and Roy Ward Baker's The Flame Trees of Thika (1982), based on Elspeth Huxley's memoir of her childhood in Kenya.
Throughout her career Ann was a tireless fighter for talented women and for women's equality in a world still run by men. She was often sharply amused by the politics that kept it so. The glass ceiling at Bafta was an ongoing provocation. As a member of council for more than 25 years, she was involved in detailed planning, serving as vice-chairman of the film committee in 1987-88 and 1993-94. She was awarded an OBE in 1989.
She fought the same battles for common sense as treasurer of the flats in Highgate Spinney, a modernist ark of north London liberal values where she lived from the mid-1970s with her partner, Robin Morton-Smith. It was a marriage of affectionate opposites - Ann the committed sceptic, mistress of the raised eyebrow; Robin, the instinctive believer, daughter of missionaries in China - and together they inspired a wide circle of loving friends. Robin died in 2006. Ann fought loneliness, cancer, failing eyesight and hearing by, whenever possible, rediscovering her city on public transport; seeing friends, movies, matinees at the National Theatre and concerts at the Wigmore Hall.
· Ann Louise Chegwidden, film editor, born April 27 1921; died September 6 2007