Anne Bauchens (February 2, 1882 – May 7, 1967) was an American film editor who is remembered for her collaboration over 40 years with the producer-director Cecil B. DeMille.
In 1935, she became the first female nominee for the new Academy Award for Best Film Editing for her work in Cleopatra, which was also nominated for Outstanding Production. In 1941, she was nominated a second time and won for North West Mounted Police (1940), DeMille's first three-strip Technicolor film. She received two more nominations, for the Best Picture winner The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and the Best Picture nominee The Ten Commandments (1956), her last film.
In 1956, she received the American Cinema Editors Achievement Award for "distinctive achievement in film editing and for outstanding contribution to the film industry over a period of years."
Originally Roseanne Bauchens, she was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Otto Bauchens and Louella McKee. She had a brother named Harry. She never married.
Bauchens was trained as an editor by DeMille, and shared her first credit with him on the film Carmen (1915). Prior to 1918, DeMille had edited, as well as directed, his films. After Carmen and We Can't Have Everything (1918), Bauchens no longer shared the editing credits with DeMille. She edited DeMille's films for the rest of their long careers, through the film The Ten Commandments (1956).
When the Academy Award for Best Film Editing was created in 1934, Bauchens received one of the three nominations for her editing of Cleopatra. She later won the Academy Award for North West Mounted Police (1940) and became the first woman to win the Oscar in that category. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Film Editing again twice, first for The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) and then for The Ten Commandments (1956). In total, Bauchens is credited with editing on 43 films directed by DeMille and on 20 films with other directors.
In a 1947 newspaper article, Bauchens talked about some of the films she worked on. She said she got her "biggest thrill" from the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments; she considered it her most difficult assignment because DeMille had 16 cameras and shot enough footage for ten films. DeMille thought the Red Sea sequence was too long, but Bauchens convinced him to leave it as it was. She also said she got her "deepest emotional feeling" from The King of Kings (1927), and believed that Unconquered (1947) was DeMille's best frontier film.
In 1956, Bauchens described DeMille as "actually two men in one, all business and strict when he works, and a magnificently gracious and easy host when at leisure. He is a man whose judgment you respect, who knows what he wants, who has temperament and fire but is courteous and who can tell a story better than anyone else."
In his autobiography, DeMille wrote:
NOTE: Some films were released/premiered at the end of a given year, but not copyrighted until the beginning of the following year. The sources themselves are inconsistent as to which date they applied to a given film. Either date might be used in the title of its corresponding Wikipedia article.