Alice Guy

Alice Guy, the world's first female filmmaker, was born in France and entered the film industry in 1896 as a secretary at Gaumont, a company that manufactured movie cameras and projectors and had acquired a "cinématographe" from its inventors, the Lumière brothers. In 1897, Gaumont became the world's first motion picture production company when it began making films, and Guy became its first film director. She impressed the company with the quantity and quality of her work, averaging two two-reelers a week, and by 1905 she was appointed production director, overseeing the company's other directors. In 1907, she married Herbert Blaché, an Englishman who managed Gaumont's British and German offices. The couple moved to the U.S. to establish the company's operations there. In 1910, Alice Guy founded her own production company, Solax, in New York and, with her husband, built a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey. After a period of critical and financial success, their fortunes declined when Thomas Alva Edison's trust disrupted film production on the East Coast, leading to the studio's closure in 1919. While her husband found work directing films for several major Hollywood studios, Guy was unable to secure any directorial roles there, did not make any more films, and most of her work was lost or miscredited. She received no recognition for her pioneering contributions in France or the United States. Guy returned to France in 1922 after her divorce from Blaché and later returned to the U.S. in 1964, living in Mahwah, New Jersey, near her original studios, where she died in 1968.