Bill Varney | Film sound mixer, 77

Bill Varney, 77, an Academy Award-winning sound mixer whose final film credit was a "director's edition" of Orson Welles'

Touch of Evil

released on the film's 40th anniversary, died Saturday of congestive heart failure in Fairhope, Ala., the Cinema Audio Society announced. He was the organization's former president.

He won back-to-back Oscars for sound on The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

In 1998, Mr. Varney was vice president of sound operations for Universal Pictures when he joined a team that reedited the 1958 film noir classic Touch of Evil based on a 58-page memo that director Welles wrote the year before the movie was released.

One of his first film projects, in the 1950s, featured folksinger Joan Baez in a movie produced at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her father taught physics.

In 1961, Mr. Varney moved to California to help produce educational films for Encyclopedia Britannica.

By 1972, he had begun working as a sound mixer in film and television, and over the next quarter-century, contributed to 85 projects.

He received Oscar nominations for Dune (1984) and Back to the Future (1985) and an Emmy nomination for the landmark television series Roots (1977).

He spent 14 years at Samuel Goldwyn Co. and in 1985 joined Universal to supervise its sound operations.

- Los Angeles Times