Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino (4 February 1918 – 3 August 1995) was an English-American film actress and director, and a pioneer among women filmmakers. In her forty-eight-year career, she appeared in fifty-nine films and directed seven others, mostly in the United States, where she became a citizen in 1948. She co-wrote and co-produced some of her own films as well. She appeared in serial television programmes fifty-eight times and directed fifty other episodes. Additionally, she contributed as a writer to five films and four TV episodes.

Spouses

Louis Hayward
(m. 1938; div. 1945)
Collier Young
(m. 1948; div. 1951)
Howard Duff
(m. 1951; div. 1984)

Children 1

Parents 

Stanley Lupino
Connie Emerald

Relatives - Lupino Lane (paternal uncle)

Early life and family

Lupino was born in Camberwell, London, to actress Connie O'Shea (also known as Connie Emerald) and music hall entertainer Stanley Lupino, a member of the theatrical Lupino family. Lupino's birth year is 1918 and not 1914 as some biographies have claimed. Her sister, Rita (born 1920), became an actress and dancer.

During World War II, Ida Lupino served as a Lieutenant in the Women's Ambulance and Defense Corps. After taking a hiatus from appearing in films, she composed music for a short time, even having her piece "Aladdin's Lamp" performed by the L.A. Philharmonic in 1937. She worked briefly in radio. As a girl, Ida was encouraged to enter show business by both her parents and her uncle, Lupino Lane, an acrobatic film and stage comic and director. At the age of seven Lupino wrote and starred in the play Mademoiselle for a school production.

Career

Acting

Lupino trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two terms and made her first film appearance in The Love Race (1931), the next year making Her First Affaire, a film her mother originally tested for. She played leading roles in five British films in 1933 at Warner Bros.' Teddington studios and for Julius Hagen at Twickenham, including in The Ghost Camera with John Mills and I Lived with You with Ivor Novello. She moved to Hollywood at the end of that year for the opportunity to play the lead role in Alice in Wonderland (1933).

Lupino starred in over a dozen films in the mid-1930s including Search for Beauty. This was an international film in which Paramount Studios conceived the idea of a competition amongst the English speaking countries to select the most attractive male and female winners of those countries and a number of USA states. There was, for example a Mr and a Miss Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England, Scotland etc. who travelled to Hollywood to have a part in the film. The version released in New Zealand, for example, would have the New Zealand winners in it, the Australian version would have the Australian winners and so on. She worked with Columbia in a two film deal, one of which being The Light That Failed (1939), a role she had acquired after running into the director's office unannounced and demanding an audition. After this performance, she began to be taken seriously as a dramatic actress. As a result, her parts improved during the 1940s, and she described herself as "the poor man's Bette Davis" as she acquired the leftover roles that Bette Davis refused.

Mark Hellinger, associate producer at Warner Bros., was particularly impressed by this performance, and hired her for a role in They Drive by Night (1940), which led to a Warner Bros. contract, which she negotiated to include some free-lance rights. She starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in this film and High Sierra (1941). Warner Bros. received a great amount of defiance from Lupino, who refused roles that she felt were "beneath her dignity as an actress." As a result, she spent a great deal of her time at Warner Bros. suspended. For her performance in The Hard Way (1943), she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. She starred in Pillow to Post (1945), which would be her only comedic leading role in her film history. She worked regularly and was in demand throughout the 1940s without becoming a major star until later. In 1947, Lupino left Warner Bros. after refusing to renew her contract. She then moved to Columbia Pictures, where she appeared in films such as Road House and On Dangerous Ground before developing a directing career. Lupino often incurred the ire of studio boss Jack Warner by objecting to her casting or making script revisions deemed unacceptable. In 1942, she also rejected an offer to star opposite Ronald Reagan in Kings Row and was immediately put on suspension at the studio. Eventually, a tentative rapprochement was brokered, but their relationship remained strained, and after the drama Deep Valley (1947) finished shooting, neither party moved to renew her contract.

Directing

In the mid-1940s, while on suspension for turning down a role, Lupino became interested in directing. Her time on suspension allowed her to spend her time observing the filming and editing processes, which would aid her in her directorial endeavours. She described herself as being bored on set while "someone else seemed to be doing all the interesting work." She co-wrote and co-produced some of her own films as well. She and her husband Collier Young formed an independent company, The Filmakers, and Lupino became a producer, director and screenwriter of low-budget, issue-oriented films. Their company would go on to produce twelve feature films, six of which she directed or co-directed, five of which she wrote or co-wrote, three of which she acted in, and one of which she co-produced.

Lupino claims she “…did not set out to be a director,” but it was a reality she had to face when her first directing job came unexpectedly in 1949 when Elmer Clifton suffered a mild heart attack and could not finish Not Wanted, a film she co-produced and co-wrote. Lupino stepped in to finish the film but did not take directorial credit out of respect for Clifton. Although the subject of the film was controversial, it received a vast amount of publicity, and she was invited to discuss the film with Eleanor Roosevelt on a national radio programme.

She went on to direct her own projects, becoming the first actress to produce, direct and write her own films. Lupino once called herself a "bulldozer" to secure financing for her production company, and she referred to herself as "mother"—the quintessence of creation— while on set.

In an article for the Village Voice, Carrie Rickey wrote that Lupino was a model of modern feminist filmmaking:

Not only did Lupino take control of production, direction and screenplay, but each of her movies addresses the brutal repercussions of sexuality, independence and dependence.

After four "woman's" films about social issues – including Outrage (1950), a film about rape – Lupino directed her first hard-paced, fast-moving film, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), making her the first woman to direct a film noir. Writer Richard Koszarski noted:

Her films display the obsessions and consistencies of a true auteur.... In her films The Bigamist and The Hitch-Hiker Lupino was able to reduce the male to the same sort of dangerous, irrational force that women represented in most male-directed examples of Hollywood film noir.

Lupino often joked that if she had been the "poor man's Bette Davis" as an actress, then she had become the "poor man's Don Siegel" as a director. In 1952, Lupino was invited to become the "fourth star" in Four Star Productions by Dick Powell, David Niven and Charles Boyer, after Joel McCrea and Rosalind Russell had dropped out of the company.

Because she was a female director, her studio emphasised her femininity, often at the urging of Lupino herself. As one professor puts it "…Lupino's cinematic tenure can be understood as a varied and complex attempt to control both image and image reception." She even credited her refusal to renew her contract with Warner Bros. under the pretences of her domesticity, claiming "I had decided that nothing lay ahead of me but the life of the neurotic star with no family and no home." She wanted to seem unthreatening in a male dominated environment, which is made clear by a statement she made in which she says, "That's where being a man makes a great deal of difference. I don't suppose the men particularly care about leaving their wives and children. During the vacation period the wife can always fly over and be with him. It's difficult for a wife to say to her husband, come sit on the set and watch," in regards to the benefit of being a male director. Although directing became Lupino's passion, the drive for money kept her on camera, so that she could acquire the appropriate funds to make her own productions.

Television

Lupino continued acting throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Her directing efforts during these years were almost exclusively television productions such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, The Twilight Zone, Have Gun – Will Travel, Honey West, The Donna Reed Show, Gilligan's Island, 77 Sunset Strip, The Rifleman, The Virginian, Sam Benedict, The Untouchables, Hong Kong, The Fugitive and Bewitched.

Lupino appeared in nineteen episodes of Four Star Playhouse from 1952 to 1956. From January 1957 to September 1958, Lupino starred with her then husband, Howard Duff, in the CBS sitcom Mr. Adams and Eve, in which the duo played husband and wife film stars named Howard Adams and Eve Drake, living in Beverly Hills, California. Duff and Lupino also co-starred as themselves in 1959 in one of the thirteen one-hour instalments of The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour. Lupino guest-starred on numerous television programmes, including The Ford Television Theatre (1954), Bonanza (1959), Burke's Law (1963–64), The Virginian (1963–65), Batman (1968), The Mod Squad (1969), Family Affair (1969–70), The Wild, Wild West (1969), Columbo: Short Fuse (1972), Columbo: Swan Song (1974), Barnaby Jones (1974), The Streets of San Francisco, Ellery Queen (1975), Police Woman (1975) and Charlie's Angels (1977), to name a few.

She is also noted as having two distinctions with The Twilight Zone. She is the only woman to have directed an episode ("The Masks") and the only person to have served as both a director and an on-screen performer (in "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine"). She made her final film appearance in 1978 and retired at the age of 60.

Personal life

In June 1948, Lupino became an American citizen.

Lupino was a staunch Democrat who supported the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

Marriages

Lupino was married and divorced three times. She married actor Louis Hayward in November 1938. They separated in May 1944 and divorced in May 1945. Her second marriage was to producer Collier Young on 5 August 1948. They divorced in 1951. Lupino's third and final marriage was to actor Howard Duff, whom she married on 21 October 1951. The couple had a daughter, Bridget on 23 April 1952. Lupino and Duff divorced in 1983.

In 1983, Lupino petitioned a California court to appoint her business manager, Mary Ann Anderson, as her conservator due to poor business dealings from her prior business management company and her long separation from Howard Duff.

Death

Lupino died from a stroke while undergoing treatment for colon cancer in Los Angeles on 3 August 1995, at the age of 77. Lupino's memoirs, Ida Lupino: Beyond the Camera, were edited after her death and published by Mary Ann Anderson.

Awards

Lupino has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the fields of television and film. They are located at 1724 Vine Street and 6821 Hollywood Boulevard. She won the inaugural Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Devil's Rain.

***

Ida Lupino (4 February 1918 – 3 August 1995) was a British actress, director, writer, and producer.

Throughout her 48-year career, she appeared in 59 films and directed eight, working primarily in the United States, where she became a citizen in 1948. She is widely regarded as the most prominent female filmmaker working in the 1950s during the Hollywood studio system. With her independent production company, she co-wrote and co-produced several social-message films and became the first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker, in 1953.

Among Lupino's other directed films, the best known are Not Wanted (1949), about unwed pregnancy (she took over for a sick director and refused directorial credit); Never Fear (1950), loosely based upon her own experiences battling paralyzing polio; Outrage (1950), one of the first films about rape; The Bigamist (1953) (which was named in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die); and The Trouble with Angels (1966). Her short yet immensely influential directorial career, tackling themes of women trapped by social conventions, usually under melodramatic or noir coverings, is a pioneering example of proto-feminist filmmaking.

As an actress, Lupino's best known films are The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) with Basil Rathbone; They Drive by Night (1940) with George Raft and Humphrey Bogart; High Sierra (1941) with Bogart; The Sea Wolf (1941) with Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield; Ladies in Retirement (1941) with Louis Hayward; Moontide (1942) with Jean Gabin; The Hard Way (1943); Deep Valley (1947) with Dane Clark; Road House (1948) with Cornel Wilde and Richard Widmark; While the City Sleeps (1956) with Dana Andrews and Vincent Price; and Junior Bonner (1972) with Steve McQueen.

Lupino also directed more than 100 episodes of television shows in a variety of genres, including westerns, supernatural tales, situation comedies, murder mysteries, and gangster stories. She was the only woman to direct an episode of the original The Twilight Zone series ("The Masks"), and the only director to star in an episode ("The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine").

Early life and family

Lupino was born at 33 Ardbeg Road in Herne Hill, London, to actress Connie O'Shea (also known as Connie Emerald) and music hall comedian Stanley Lupino, a member of the theatrical Lupino family, which included Lupino Lane, a song-and-dance man. Her great-grandfather, George Hook, changed his name to Lupino. Her father, a top name in musical comedy in the UK, encouraged her to perform at an early age. He built a backyard theatre for Lupino and her sister Rita (1921–2016), who also became an actress and dancer. Lupino wrote her first play at age seven and toured with a travelling theatre company as a child. By the age of ten, Lupino had memorised the leading female roles in Shakespeare's plays. After her childhood training for stage plays, Ida's uncle Lupino Lane assisted her in moving towards film acting by getting her work as a background actress at British International Studios.

She wanted to be a writer, but to please her father, Lupino enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She excelled in a number of "bad girl" film roles, often playing prostitutes. Lupino did not enjoy being an actress and felt uncomfortable with many of the early roles she was given. She felt that she was pushed into the profession due to her family history.

Career

Actress

Lupino made her first film appearance in The Love Race (1931) and the following year, aged 14, she worked under director Allan Dwan in Her First Affaire, in a role for which her mother had previously tested. She played leading roles in five British films in 1933 at Warner Bros.' Teddington studios and for Julius Hagen at Twickenham, including The Ghost Camera with John Mills and I Lived with You with Ivor Novello.

Dubbed "the English Jean Harlow", she was discovered by Paramount in the 1933 film Money for Speed, playing a good girl/bad girl dual role. Lupino claimed the talent scouts saw her play only the sweet girl in the film and not the part of the prostitute, so she was asked to try out for the lead role in Alice in Wonderland (1933). When she arrived in Hollywood, the Paramount producers did not know what to make of their sultry potential leading lady, but she did get a five-year contract. While at Paramount, Lupino played the lead in a stage production of The Pursuit of Happiness at the Paramount Studio Theatre.

Lupino starred in over a dozen films in the mid-1930s, working with Columbia in a two-film deal, one of which, The Light That Failed (1939), was a role she acquired after running into the director's office unannounced, demanding an audition. After this breakthrough performance as a spiteful cockney model who torments Ronald Colman, she began to be taken seriously as a dramatic actress. As a result, her parts improved during the 1940s, and she jokingly referred to herself as "the poor man's Bette Davis", taking the roles that Davis refused.

Mark Hellinger, associate producer at Warner Bros., was impressed by Lupino's performance in The Light That Failed, and hired her for the femme-fatale role in the Raoul Walsh-directed They Drive by Night (1940), opposite stars George Raft, Ann Sheridan and Humphrey Bogart. The film did well and the critical consensus was that Lupino stole the movie, particularly in her unhinged courtroom scene. Warner Bros. offered her a contract which she negotiated to include some freelance rights. She worked with Walsh and Bogart again in High Sierra (1941), where she impressed critic Bosley Crowther in her role as an "adoring moll".

Her performance in The Hard Way (1943) won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. She starred in Pillow to Post (1945), which was her only comedic leading role. After the drama Deep Valley (1947) finished shooting, neither Warner Bros. nor Lupino moved to renew her contract and she left the studio in 1947. Although in demand throughout the 1940s, she arguably never became a major star although she often had top billing in her pictures, above actors such as Humphrey Bogart, and was repeatedly critically lauded for her realistic, direct acting style.

She often incurred the ire of studio boss Jack Warner by objecting to her casting, refusing poorly written roles that she felt were beneath her dignity as an actress, and making script revisions deemed unacceptable by the studio. As a result, she spent a great deal of her time at Warner Bros. suspended. In 1942, she rejected an offer to star with Ronald Reagan in Kings Row, and was immediately put on suspension at the studio. Eventually, a tentative rapprochement was brokered, but her relationship with the studio remained strained. In 1947, Lupino left Warner Brothers and appeared for 20th Century Fox as a nightclub singer in the film noir Road House, performing her musical numbers in the film. She starred in On Dangerous Ground in 1951, and may have taken on some of the directing tasks of the film while director Nicholas Ray was ill.

Director, writer and producer – The Filmakers Inc.

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

While on suspension, Lupino had ample time to observe filming and editing processes, and she became interested in directing. She described how bored she was on set while "someone else seemed to be doing all the interesting work".

She and her then-husband, producer and writer Collier Young, formed an independent company, The Filmakers Inc., to "produce, direct, and write low-budget, issue-oriented films". It was formed in 1948 with Lupino as vice-president, Collier Young as president, and screenwriter Malvin Wald as treasurer. The Filmakers produced 12 feature films, six of which Lupino directed or co-directed, five of which she wrote or co-wrote, three of which she acted in, and one of which she co-produced. The Filmakers' mission was to make socially conscious films, encourage new talent, and bring realism to the screen. Their goal was to tell “how America lives” through independent B pictures shot in two weeks for less than $200,000 with a creative “family,” “the ring of truth” emphasized by fact-based stories – a combination of “social significance” and entertainment. In short, low-budget pictures, they explored virtually taboo subjects such as rape in Outrage (1950) and the self-explanatory The Bigamist (1953). The latter received rave reviews at the time of release, with Howard Thompson of The New York Times calling it "Filmakers' best offering, to date". Lupino's best known directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker, a 1953 RKO release, is the only film noir from the genre's classic period directed by a woman.

Her first directing job came unexpectedly in 1949 when director Elmer Clifton suffered a mild heart attack and was unable to finish Not Wanted, a film Lupino co-produced and co-wrote. Lupino stepped in to finish the film without taking directorial credit out of respect for Clifton. Although the film's subject of out-of-wedlock pregnancy was controversial, it received a vast amount of publicity, and she was invited to discuss the film with Eleanor Roosevelt on a national radio program.

Never Fear (1949), a film about polio (which she had personally experienced at age 16), was her first director's credit. The film was noticed by Howard Hughes, who was looking for suppliers of low-budget feature films for distribution by his recently acquired RKO Pictures. Hughes agreed to put up financing and distribute The Filmakers’ next three features through RKO, leaving The Filmakers total control over the content and the production of the films. After producing four more films about social issues, including Outrage (1950), a film about rape (while this word is never used in the movie), Lupino directed her first hard-paced, all-male-cast film, The Hitch-Hiker (1953), making her the first woman to direct a film noir.

Lupino once called herself a "bulldozer" to secure financing for her production company, but she referred to herself as "mother" while on set. On set, the back of her director's chair was labeled "Mother of Us All". Her studio emphasized her femininity, often at the urging of Lupino herself. She credited her refusal to renew her contract with Warner Bros. under the pretenses of domesticity, claiming "I had decided that nothing lay ahead of me but the life of the neurotic star with no family and no home." She made a point to seem nonthreatening in a male-dominated environment, stating, "That's where being a man makes a great deal of difference. I don't suppose the men particularly care about leaving their wives and children. During the vacation period, the wife can always fly over and be with him. It's difficult for a wife to say to her husband, come sit on the set and watch."

Although directing became Lupino's passion, the drive for money kept her on camera, so she could acquire the funds to make her own productions. She became a wily low-budget filmmaker, reusing sets from other studio productions and talking her physician into appearing as a doctor in the delivery scene of Not Wanted. She used what is now called product placement, placing Coca-Cola, United Airlines, Cadillac, and other brands in her films, such as The Bigamist. She was acutely conscious of budget considerations, planning scenes in pre-production to avoid technical mistakes and retakes, and shooting in public places such as MacArthur Park and Chinatown to avoid set-rental costs. She joked that if she had been the "poor man's Bette Davis" as an actress, she had now become the "poor man's Don Siegel" as a director.

The Filmakers production company ceased operations in 1955, and Lupino turned almost immediately to television, directing episodes of more than thirty US TV series from 1956 through 1968. She also helmed a feature film in 1965 for the Catholic schoolgirl comedy The Trouble With Angels, starring Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell; this was Lupino's last theatrical film as a director. She continued acting as well, going on to a successful television career throughout the 1960s and '70s.

Personal life

Spouses

• Louis Hayward, (m. 1938; div. 1945)​​​,
• Collier Young, (m. 1948; div. 1951)​​​
• Howard Duff, (m. 1951; div. 1984)​​​

Children 1

Parents

• Stanley Lupino (father)
• Connie Emerald (mother)

Health

Lupino was diagnosed with polio in 1934. The New York Times reported that the outbreak of polio within the Hollywood community was due to contaminated swimming pools. She recovered and eventually directed, produced, and wrote many films, including a film loosely based upon her travails with polio titled Never Fear in 1949, the first film that she was credited for directing (she had earlier stepped in for an ill director on Not Wanted and refused directorial credit out of respect for her colleague). Her experience with the disease gave her the courage to focus on her intellectual abilities over simply her physical appearance. In an interview with Hollywood, she said, "I realized that my life and my courage and my hopes did not lie in my body. If that body was paralyzed, my brain could still work industriously...If I weren't able to act, I would be able to write. Even if I weren't able to use a pencil or typewriter, I could dictate." Film magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, such as The Hollywood Reporter and Motion Picture Daily, frequently published updates on her condition. Lupino worked for various nonprofit organizations to raise funds for polio research.

Lupino's interests outside the entertainment industry included writing short stories and children's books, and composing music. Her composition "Aladdin's Suite" was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1937. She composed it while recovering from polio in 1935.

Politics and religion

She became an American citizen in June 1948 and was a staunch Democrat who supported the presidency of John F. Kennedy. She was Catholic.

Marriages

Lupino was married and divorced three times. She married actor Louis Hayward in November 1938. They separated in May 1944 and divorced in May 1945.

Her second marriage was to producer Collier Young on 5 August 1948. They divorced in 1951. When Lupino filed for divorce in September that year, she was already pregnant from an affair with future husband Howard Duff. The child was born seven months after she filed for divorce from Young.

Lupino's third and final marriage was to actor Howard Duff, whom she wed on 21 October 1951. Six months later, they had a daughter, Bridget, on 23 April 1952. They separated in 1966 and divorced in 1983.

She petitioned a California court in 1984 to appoint her business manager, Mary Ann Anderson, as her conservator due to poor business dealings from her prior business management company and her long separation from Howard Duff.

Death

Lupino died from a stroke while undergoing treatment for colon cancer in Los Angeles on 3 August 1995, at the age of 77. Her memoirs, Ida Lupino: Beyond the Camera, were edited after her death and published by Mary Ann Anderson.