O'Steen was born in
Paragould, Arkansas but raised in
California. As a child in
Burbank, he would try to make it onto the
Warner Bros. lot hoping it could be an entree to work in the editing room. He was finally able to secure a position as an assistant editor in 1956, when he became
George Tomasini's assistant editor on
Alfred Hitchcock's 1957 film
The Wrong Man. Within a year, O'Steen had become the editor on Mike Nichols' first film as a director, ''
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?''. O'Steen was Nichols' principal editor for nearly thirty years, during which he edited twelve of Nichols' films; their last film together was
Wolf (1994). O'Steen had been working as a principal editor for only three years when he edited Nichols' second film,
The Graduate, but Patrick J. Sauer considers this film to be the epitome of O'Steen's editing: In his volume from the
History of American Cinema series, Paul Monaco emphasizes the innovative aspects of the editing of
The Graduate: O'Steen directed seven films for television in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably
Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975) and ''
Kids Don't Tell (1985). He also directed one feature film, Sparkle (1976). His editing of The Graduate
(1967) was honored by a BAFTA Award for Best Editing, and he was nominated for this award again for Chinatown
(1974). He was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Film Editing, for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
(1966), Chinatown
(1974), and Silkwood'' (directed by Mike Nichols, 1983). In 1976, O'Steen won the "Most Outstanding Television Director" award from the
Directors Guild of America (DGA). His film
Queen of the Stardust Ballroom won the
Outstanding Directorial Achievement Award in the category "Movies for Television and Mini-Series". He was also nominated for an
Emmy award for "Outstanding Directing in a Special Program - Drama or Comedy" for his work on
Queen of the Stardust Ballroom. O'Steen was married twice and had four daughters. His memoir, ''Cut to the Chase: Forty-Five Years of Editing America's Favorite Movies'', The book is written mostly as a transcript of O'Steen's responses to questions posed by his second wife, Bobbie (Meyer) O'Steen, with sidebars about individual films and filmmakers. Ray Zone characterized it as "one of the very best anecdotal histories of filmmaking in print." ==Filmography (Editor)==