Like many picture editors from an earlier era, Chris Willingham, ACE, never went to film school — the official kind, anyway. Instead, it might be said that Willingham went to a series of ersatz film schools, including beginning his professional life in the newsroom at what was then KHJ-TV (Channel 9) in Los Angeles and launching his Hollywood career at Stephen J. Cannell Productions.
“You really had to learn how to work with any kind of film,” said Willingham’s widow, Lynne Willingham, ACE, about her future husband’s early years with Cannell. Chris Willingham died in June 2025 at the age of 74.
“Chris liked that atmosphere,” she said.
“It was very much like a campus.”
From those formative experiences, Willingham built a reputation as a creative, enterprising, and generous editor on television, including a stint on the massively influential show “24” that netted him three Primetime Emmy Awards out of five nominations. His other notable shows include Cannell’s 1980s-era staples “The A-Team” and “21 Jump Street” as well as, for producer Chris Carter, “The X Files,” on which he worked with Lynne, also a distinguished picture editor.
“Chris had a knack for fearless, sometimes acrobatic editing to tell the story in its best light,” said picture editor Casey O. Rohrs, who first worked with Willingham in 1982 at Stephen J. Cannell Productions. “I was always amazed at how effortless he made huge complicated scenes appear to be. Sometimes his editing was perfectly invisible, when it was appropriate, and other times, so impactful and energetic that you couldn’t help but think, ‘Holy cow, what an amazing editor this man is!’”
Chris Willingham was born in Culver City to Gordon Willingham, a cameraman for ABC, and his wife, Rosemary. His parents divorced when he was in childhood. Following a stretch in the Navy, he sought and found employment in the mailroom at KHJ. “A lot of us start in the mailroom,” Lynne Willingham said. “He just worked over into editing news clips and cutting down movies and things like that.”
After several years at the station, Willingham was alerted to an opening at Universal Pictures but with the understanding that he would have to start within a matter of days. “He could not give them notice, which really ticked them off at KHJ,” Lynne Willingham said. “But he went to Universal and he got into [the] IA and majors and never looked back.”
Within a short period of time, Willingham caught on with Stephen J. Cannell, who had been at Universal Television. “When Stephen went to start his own studio, he first made ‘The Greatest American Hero,’ and they moved to the Paramount lot,” Lynne Willingham said. By then, Chris Willingham had accumulated picture editing credits on “B.J. and the Bear” and other popular series of the time. “Stephen took a lot of editors with him, and Chris was one.”
Willingham’s tenure with Cannell lasted for about 10 years. “He was the most prolific producer in Hollywood,” said Lynne Willingham, who was also employed at the studio. “At the height of that studio, we had 21 film editors. We had seven shows on the air, and a complete sound department that was just on all year long.”
Picture editor David Latham also met Willingham while working for Cannell on “The Greatest American Hero.” “He was very generous to work with, letting me cut scenes and [giving] me credit if the producers liked my work,” Latham, then an assistant, said of Willingham. “That led to my promotion to editor on ‘The A-Team.’ Subsequently, we both moved on to cut ‘21 Jump Street.’”
Latham added: “He was admired for his instinctive talent and well-liked for his good nature and wonderful sense of humor.”
As it turned out, Stephen J. Cannell Productions not only provided Willingham with considerable cutting room experience but also proved consequential in an entirely different way: it was there that he met Lynne. “I was an assistant and he was an editor,” Lynne Willingham said. “I never assisted him, which was probably a really good thing, but we just ran into each other and it sort of blossomed.” they found they connected on multiple levels. “The good thing about a marriage if you’re both doing the same thing is that you can keep talking about it,” Lynne Willingham said. “We had a producer once who said, ‘I love that you two are married because I know what happens. You’re giving me 24 hours a day.’”
Chris and Lynne married in 1988, although in the years that followed, it was comparatively rare for them to toil on the same show. One such series was “The X-Files.” “It was really fun,” Lynne Willingham said. “We did share assistants, because it was three [editors] and two [assistants] at the time. But there wasn’t really a lot of overlap. I don’t even know at the time if either of us picked up scenes for each other.” The couple also traveled to Italy to collaborate on the historical drama “Empire,” which aired on ABC in 2005.
After his tour of duty with Cannell was complete, Willingham progressed to working with the writing-producing team of Glen Morgan and James Wong on “Space: Above and Beyond.” From 2001 to 2005,
Willingham arguably reached the summit of his career with his run editing episodes of Fox’s “24,” the action thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland that committed to a real-time format (including a ceaselessly ticking-away clock on the screen). “I don’t think he expected it to be as big a deal as it was,” Lynne Willingham said. “He liked the creative challenge of trying to follow a clock. You couldn’t do things like cut away and come back. The clock is ticking; it’s a character.”
Amid the success of “24,” Willingham got the opportunity to edit several feature films, including “Final Destination 3” (2006), directed by Wong and written by Morgan and Wong. Apart from that film, though, Lynne Willingham said that her husband never became acclimated to the feature world. “He wasn’t great in interviews,” she said. “He wasn’t someone who’d go in and really sell himself.” His other feature credits include Morgan’s remake of “Black Christmas” (2006) and “Amusement” (2008). Eventually, he returned to the world he knew best, episodic television, including NBC’s supernatural-inflected detective show “Grimm.”
Having worked in so many different genres and with so many different personalities, Willingham had gained a sense of how to work productively with competing creative forces, his wife said. “You have to be able to not only know story but be very diplomatic,” she said. “You’re working with all these high-powered producers and these writers and directors, and you have to make them all happy. That’s an art form, too, which he was very good at.”
Willingham retired in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. “He had done a few shows that were not very satisfying to him, to be honest,” said Lynne Willingham, who herself retired in 2023. “We had a couple of nice years where we could just hang and do things together.”
After being diagnosed with diabetes in 2022, he began complaining about feeling unwell on intermittent occasions. The last time he did so, in June 2025, he experienced the heart attack that took his life. Yet Willingham’s legacy in the cutting room survives him — both the work that he did in accumulating over 100,000 union hours over 46 years, and the joy he gave to his colleagues.
“Quite literally up to the day he died, we would, depending on who was saying it, either share or inflict bad puns on each other,” said Jim Thomson, who worked with Willingham as an assistant picture editor on “Space: Above and Beyond” and “Millennium.” “It was a running joke: who could have the geekiest, goofiest joke, particularly science- or math-based. And Monty Python.”
Added Latham: “Chris was a kindhearted guy with an irresistible goofy side. Perhaps the most entertaining guy I’ve ever known. I miss him a lot.”
In addition to his wife, Willingham is survived by his daughters, Lisa and Julia, and his grandchildren, Ella, Avery, and Hollyn, and a houseful of critters.
— Peter Tonguette
