Penelope Houston, who edited the British Film Institute’s cinema magazine Sight & Sound for 35 years, has died at the age of 88.

A charismatic figure keen on straight-talking, chain-smoking and betting on the horses, Houston took control of the iconic magazine in 1956, taking over from Gavin Lambert after he left for Hollywood. Houston had co-founded an earlier magazine with Lambert at Oxford, alongside editors Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz.

In addition to her editing duties – including instigating the once-a-decade polls for which the magazine remains famous – Houston wrote several seminal books on film and criticism, including The Contemporary Cinema, in 1963.

She also acted as deputy film critic at the Times and the Observer, and wrote occasionally for the Guardian.

After retiring in 1990, Houston co-wrote a short study of Alberto Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well? (1992) and Keepers of the Frame (1994), about the BFI’s archives.

Houston working on a 1960 issue of the magazine – video

Paying tribute, the current Sight & Sound editor, Nick James, recalled Houston’s “toughness and clarity” and the combination in her writing of “elegance with pinpoint perspicacity”. He had tried to commission her to write about Preston Sturges a few years before, he revealed. “[S]he thanked me and said that she’d written something on him probably in the 1950s and had nothing more to add.”