Alice Guy

The world's first motion picture director, French-born Alice Guy entered the film business in 1896 as a secretary at Gaumont, a manufacturer of movie cameras and projectors who had purchased the invention from the Lumiere brothers. The next year Gaumont became the world's first motion picture production company when they switched to creating movies, and Guy became its first film director.

She impressed the the company so much with the output (she averaged two two-reelers a week) and quality of her productions that by 1905 she was made the company's production director, supervising the company's other directors.

In 1907 she married Herbert Blaché, an Englishman who ran the company's British and German offices. The pair soon went to the U. S. to set up the company's operations there.

Alice and her husband Herbert Blaché immigrated to the United States on June 19, 1909.

In 1910 she and Blaché set up their own production company, Solax, in New York and built a studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

After a period of critical and financial success, the company's fortunes declined and they eventually shut down the studio in 1919. Although her husband secured work directing films for several major Hollywood studios, Guy was never able to secure any directorial jobs there, and never made a film again.

She returned to France in 1922 after her divorce from Blaché, and in 1964 returned to the U. S.

She was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2013 for her services to history.