Madeleine Malthête-Méliès

Madeleine Malthête-Méliès (1923 – 8 July 2018) was a French film archivist and historian, granddaughter of Georges Méliès (1861–1938), pioneer of early cinema. Over seven decades, she devoted her life to locating, identifying, and presenting her grandfather's films across the world, recovering more than 200 works previously believed lost. She co-founded the Cinémathèque Méliès and was a founding member of the Cinémathèque française, and is regarded as one of the central figures of worldwide cinematic heritage preservation.

Early life

In 1930, when Madeleine was seven years old, her mother Georgette Méliès died after a prolonged illness. Her father, a lyric singer, was unable to care for a young child, and she went to live with her maternal grandparents: Georges Méliès himself and his second wife, the actress Jeanne d'Alcy, known within the family as "Fanny". Langlois, co-founder of the institution, encouraged her to search for her grandfather's films, of which only eight copies were then known to survive in France. The association's mission was to locate, preserve, and promote the work of Méliès, then considered largely lost. It immediately attracted members from the Méliès family, magicians, collectors, and international film archives.

Legacy

Madeleine Malthête-Méliès died on 8 July 2018, aged 95. Over approximately 75 years of work, she contributed to the survival of Georges Méliès's legacy: what stood at eight known films in France in 1945 grew to more than 200 recovered titles, making Méliès one of the pioneering filmmakers with the best-preserved body of work in cinema history.

The organisation Domitor, dedicated to the study of early cinema, described her as a pioneering researcher and film historian who worked for more than 75 years to locate surviving copies and screen them for audiences worldwide.