Gaetano (Tony) Gaudio, A.S.C. (20 November 1883 – 10 August 1951) was a pioneer Italian-American cinematographer of more than 1000 films. Gaudio won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography for Anthony Adverse, becoming the first Italian to have won an Oscar, and was nominated five additional times for Hell's Angels, Juarez, The Letter, Corvette K-225, and A Song to Remember. He is cited as the first to have created a montage sequence for a film in The Mark of Zorro. He was among the founders of the American Society of Cinematographers, and served as president from 1924 until 1925.

Born Gaetano Antonio Gaudio in Cosenza, Italy in 1883 to a famous photographic family. The son of one of Italy’s foremost photographic artists, the boy was quite literally brought up in the studio, where he learned at an early age to use the still camera and to develop negatives in the darkroom. His father also gave him a liberal education in lenses, cameras, composition and the manipulation of lights so that when the time came to take up motion photography, the young Tony had a head full of useful information to start with.

At two months old, Tony’s family moved from Cosenza to Rome for a short period in order for Tony to attend art school. He is indebted to his art training for his later interest in the camera as a medium of art, as opposed to a mere recording instrument. Tony was hardly nine years old when he began to play with photographic papers, making his own enlargements. After attending art school in Rome, he became an assistant to his father and older brother, Rafael (Ralph) Gaudio, a prominent portrait photographer in Italy who later became president of the Society of Photography in Europe, and was nominated as Knight of the Crown in Italy for photographic achievement.

Then it became necessary to take time out from the photographic side of his education to go to military school. It was 1900 when he bade good-bye to the army and returned home, where he worked as an apprentice alongside his younger brother Eugenio (Eugene) Gaudio in the family photography studio owned by Rafael, "Foto Gaudio", in the historic center of the Calabrian city.

Eventually he segued into cinema, starting with several years with the famous Ambrosio Films in Torino- a film company popular in Italy in the early days of cinema. In 1903, 19-year-old Tony filmed “Napoleon Crossing the Alps”. Years later in a New York Times interview, Tony remembered that his only lighting problem in this film was the sun, which kept ducking behind the clouds. “It was quite bad,” Mr. Gaudio recalled. A young Gaudio shot hundreds of short subjects for Italian film companies, two or three features a week, before emigrating to America in 1906 at the age of 22 together with his brother Eugene, who would follow him to the United States.

In 1906 a young Gaudio arrived in the United States, moving to New York City. Tony was employed by Al Simpson to produce "song slides" that could be shown in theaters so patrons could sing along with the music. Twelve hand-colored slides were made for each new popular or near popular song. After quitting Simpson in 1908, Tony worked in Vitagraph’s film development laboratories in New York. It was in 1908 that Tony acted as the cinematographer for his first film in the United States, Madame Nicotine. In 1909 the photographer moved to Flatbush — which is now as for many years it has been a part of Brooklyn — where he took full charge of the Vitagraph laboratory.

Then he moved across the Brooklyn Bridge to Carl Laemmle’s Independent Moving Picture CO., supervising the construction of IMP’s New York laboratories. He had complete charge of both positive and negative departments until perfectly organized when he was promoted to be a studio manager. From 1910-1912 he became the Chief of Cinematography at IMP, shooting one picture a week and fifty a year. The leading players in the Eleventh Avenue studio at that time were Mary Pickford, King Baggot, Joe Smiley, and Owen Moore, among others. There, he shot Mary Pickford’s films for director Thomas H. Ince. In addition to being her cameraman, Gaudio also wrote For the Queen’s Honor (1911), using his writing skills from the many films he wrote and directed in Italy before then. With IMP in 1910, Tony pioneered filming underwater, shooting the first submarine picture, titled “Submarine”. He went down in a submarine at Newport News in Virginia, taking pictures inside a submersible vessel.

He then left IMP to work for Biograph, a studio established in Brooklyn Heights, where he was engaged with the specials the company was making for Klaw and Erlanger, stage producers in New York. Among these specials were Strongheart, and Classmates, with Blanche Sweet and Marshall Nielan. Together, the stage and screen men were adapting plays, one of the earliest instances in which a staged play was converted to the screen. Gaudio remained here until 1915. Gaudio found a home at Metro Pictures by 1916, where his brother Eugene now worked as a director.