Jonathan Bates was the leading film sound editor of his generation. He worked on more than 60 feature films with directors such as Otto Preminger, Sidney Lumet, Charles Crichton and Roman Polanski and, most successfully, was the sound editor for ten of Richard Attenborough’s films, including Young Winston, Cry Freedom, Gandhi, A Chorus Line, Chaplin and Shadowlands.

He was nominated for an Oscar for Gandhi and won a Bafta for Cry Freedom. He was widely admired by his peers and Lord Attenborough called Bates “the master of his art”.

The youngest son of the novelist H. E. Bates, Jonathan Bates was born in 1931 in Little Chart, Kent. At the time his father was enjoying great success as an author and screenwriter, and directors such as David Lean were regular guests at the family home.

The young Bates was determined to go into the film industry and his father helped him to get a job as a trainee at Ealing Studios, then based at MGM Borehamwood in Hertfordshire. Bates began there in 1956 and worked on the set of the Peter Finch adventure drama The Shiralee as well as making tea for Alec Guinness on the last Ealing comedy, Barnacle Bill.

After two years he had moved from the sound stages to the cutting rooms and made valuable contacts with editors and directors. He remained at Ealing, assisting in the editing rooms, until the studios closed in 1959.

He went on to work as a freelance dubbing editor on several Walt Disney films and in 1961 he was an assistant on the Bryan Forbes classic Whistle Down the Wind where he met his future wife, Jennifer Thompson, also an assistant dubbing editor. It was also the first time he worked with Attenborough, who produced the film.

Bates got his first credit as a sound editor at 23 on Station Six-Sahara (1961), which starred Carroll Baker, and for the next four decades was rarely out of work. In the 1960s he was sound editor for the all-star epic Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, Preminger’s dark thriller Bunny Lake is Missing, the Yul Brynner western The Return of the Seven, and the wartime drama Where Eagles Dare.

He worked twice for the director Peter Glenville, on Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso (1965), and on Graham Greene’s The Comedians (1967), starring Alec Guinness and Noël Coward.

Polanski hired him for his film of Macbeth (1971), and the following year Bates worked with Attenborough on the biopic Young Winston.

The 1970s and 1980s proved to be Bates’s most productive and creative period, working on blockbusters such as Murder on the Orient Express, International Velvet, A Fish Called Wanda and Cry Freedom as well as several dramas, including the Willy Russell hit Shirley Valentine.

Bates occasionally worked in television but was reunited with Attenborough in 1992 for his film Chaplin, followed by two other Attenborough films, Shadowlands, starring Anthony Hopkins, and Grey Owl with Pierce Brosnan. His final film, in 2007, was Attenborough’s Closing the Ring, a romantic drama with Shirley Maclaine.

Bates had a brain tumour diagnosed this year.

He is survived by his wife, Jennifer, and their son and daughter.

Jonathan Bates, film sound editor, was born on November 1, 1939. He died on October 31, 2008, aged 68