Chris Willingham, who won three Emmys as editor of Fox’s 24, worked on such hit shows as The X-Files and Millennium and was Stephen J. Cannell’s go-to cutter on series ranging from The A-Team and Hunter to 21 Jump Street, has died. He was 74.
A rep for his family said he died June 28 of a heart attack at his Los Angeles home.
Willingham editor dozens of TV series during his nearly 40-year career, starting out with episodes of B.J. and the Bear and The Greatest American Hero. His work on the latter got prolific series creator Cannell’s attention and landed him a more regular gig on the 1980s NBC action series The A-Team. He edited more than 25 episodes of the show starring George Peppard and Mr. T, working on all five its seasons.
His work with Cannell continued on the Fred Dryer-led cop drama Hunter, along with J.J. Starbuck, Hawkeye, Stingray Street Justice and 21 Jump Street.
Willingham met his future wife, Lynne — later a two-time Emmy-winning editor on Breaking Bad — while both were at Stephen J. Cannell Productions. They worked together on The X-Files and other shows including miniseries Empire and The Son until Cannell’s studio closed in the mid-’90s.
“Chris was an intuitive editor,” Lynne Willingham said in a statement. “He was a gifted storyteller. His pacing and choices were incredibly beautiful. You could tell when watching a series if it was his episode. He was just always in the right place at the right time. You can’t really teach that. He was funny and smart and I was so very lucky to have him not only as my wonderful husband but as my creative partner. We were a great team.”
She added that her husband once said: “We had a producer, David Levinson, who loved that he had a married couple working for him. He thought that we were often talking about the show even when we were home. Kicking around ideas for the cut with each other. And he was right. If one of us had something that wasn’t working for us, we’d run it past each other. It was great having another editor that you trusted to bounce off of.”
Chris Willingham’s biggest gig was on 24, the 2001-10 real-time spy drama that starred Keifer Sutherland as Jack Bauer. Willingham edited more than 25 episodes of the series, winning back-to-back-to-back Emmys from 2002-04 and scoring nominations for a different 2003 episode and again in 2005. He also was a three-time ACE Eddie Award nominee for the show.
Willingham later edited about a third of Grimm‘s 120-plus episodes from 2011-17.
Along the way, he also was film editor for a handful of big-screen titles including Final Destination 3 (2005), Black Christmas (2006) and Dragonball Evolution (2009).
Prior to his career as an editor, Willingham served in the Navy as a submariner before landing a job in the film-shipping department at KHJ-TV Los Angeles, working his way up into the news department. In 1978, he moved over to Universal Film Studios as an assistant film editor.
Willingham’s former assistant, Jim Thomson, once asked him what the most important thing about editing was, and he replied, “There are three important things in editing: story, story, story.”
Along with his wife of 37 years, Willingham is survived by his daughters Lisa and Julia; son-in-law, David; and granddaughters Ella, Avery and Hollyn. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that people please donate to their favorite animal rescue in his memory.
