Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino (4 February 1918 – 3 August 1995) was a British and American actress and filmmaker. 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 era. 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 paralysis by polio; Outrage (1950), one of the first films about rape; The Bigamist (1953); 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 Lupino (1828–1902) was an acrobatic clown descended from an Italian family of puppeteers. Her father, a top name in musical comedy in the UK, encouraged her to perform at an early age, building an outdoor theatre for her and her sister Rita (1921–2016), who also became an actress and dancer. By the age of ten Lupino had memorised the leading female roles in Shakespeare's plays. After all this training and experience in theatre acting, Ida's uncle Lupino Lane assisted her in moving toward film acting by getting her work as a background actress at British International Studios.

Ida wanted to be a writer but, in order to please her father, enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She excelled in a number of "bad girl" film roles, often playing prostitutes; however, she did not enjoy being an actress. Lupino was uncomfortable with many of the early parts she was given and felt 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. She said of her early roles "My father once said to me: 'You're born to be bad', and it was true. I made eight films in England before I came to America, and I played a tramp or a slut in all of them".

Lupino starred in over a dozen films in the mid-1930s while under contract to Paramount. She left the studio in late 1937 after becoming unsatisfied with her roles and remained off screen for over a year. Warner Bros. offered her a contract which she negotiated to include some freelance rights.

Her performance in The Hard Way (1943) won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. In 1941, she rejected a supporting role in Kings Row and a lead role in Juke Girl and was put on suspension at the studio. Within a few months, a rapprochement was brokered, but her relationship with the studio remained strained over the next few years. After the drama Deep Valley (1947) finished shooting, Lupino left Warner Brothers having turned down a four-year exclusive contract. 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' 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 US$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 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. 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. YearTitleThe Filmakers Inc. functionScreenplay / WritersProducersDirectors 1949 Not Wanted Production Company (Emerald Productions) Paul Jarrico Ida Lupino Malvin Wald Anson Bond Ida Lupino Elmer Clifton Ida Lupino (uncredited) 1949 Never Fear Production Company Ida Lupino Collier Young Norman A. Cook Ida Lupino Collier Young Ida Lupino James Anderson (assistant) 1950 Outrage Production Company Ida Lupino Malvin Wald Collier Young Collier Young Malvin Wald Ida Lupino 1951 Hard, Fast and Beautiful Production Company Martha Wilkerson Norman A. Cook Collier Young Ida Lupino James Anderson (assistant) 1951 On the Loose Production Company Dale Eunson Katherine Albert Collier Young Charles Lederer James Anderson (assistant) 1952 Beware, My Lovely Presented by Mel Dinelli Collier Young Mel Dinelli Harry Horner 1953 The Hitch-Hiker Present Ida Lupino Collier Young Collier Young Christian Nyby Ida Lupino 1953 The Bigamist Production Company © Collier Young Robert Eggenweiler Collier Young Ida Lupino 1954 Private Hell 36 Presents © Collier Young Ida Lupino Robert Eggenweiler Collier Young Don Siegel 1955 Mad at the World Production Company Harry Essex James H. Anderson Collier Young Harry Essex

Television

Lupino's career as a director continued through 1968. Her directing efforts during these years were almost exclusively for 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.

After the demise of The Filmakers, Lupino continued working as an actress until the end of the 1970s, mainly in television. Lupino appeared in 19 episodes of Four Star Playhouse from 1952 to 1956, an endeavor involving partners Charles Boyer, Dick Powell and David Niven. From January 1957 to September 1958, Lupino starred with her then-husband Howard Duff in the 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 13 one-hour installments of The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour and an episode of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show in 1960. Lupino guest-starred in numerous television shows, 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), Nanny and the Professor (1971), Columbo: Short Fuse (1972), Columbo: Swan Song (1974) in which she plays Johnny Cash's character's zealous wife, Barnaby Jones (1974), The Streets of San Francisco, Ellery Queen (1975), Police Woman (1975), and Charlie's Angels (1977). Her final acting appearance was in the 1979 film My Boys Are Good Boys.

Lupino has two distinctions with The Twilight Zone series, as the only woman to have directed an episode ("The Masks") and the only person to have worked as both actor for one episode ("The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine"), and director for another.

Themes Lupino's Filmakers movies deal with unconventional and controversial subject matter that studio producers would not touch, including out-of-wedlock pregnancy, bigamy, and rape. She described her independent work as "films that had social significance and yet were entertainment ... based on true stories, things the public could understand because they had happened or been of news value." She focused on women's issues for many of her films and she liked strong characters, "[Not] women who have masculine qualities about them, but [a role] that has intestinal fortitude, some guts to it."

In the film The Bigamist, the two women characters represent the career woman and the homemaker. The title character is married to a woman (Joan Fontaine) who, unable to have children, has devoted her energy to her career. While on one of many business trips, he meets a waitress (Lupino) with whom he has a child, and then marries her. Marsha Orgeron, in her book Hollywood Ambitions, describes these characters as "struggling to figure out their place in environments that mirror the social constraints that Lupino faced".

Director Martin Scorsese noted that, "As a star, Lupino had no taste for glamour, and the same was true as a director. The stories she told in Outrage, Never Fear, Hard, Fast and Beautiful, The Bigamist and The Hitch-Hiker were intimate, always set within a precise social milieu: she wanted to "do pictures with poor, bewildered people, because that's what we are." Her heroines were young women whose middle-class security was shattered by trauma – unwanted pregnancy, polio, rape, bigamy, parental abuse. There's a sense of pain, panic and cruelty that colors every frame."

Lupino rejected the commodification of female stars, and as an actress she resisted becoming an object of desire. She said in 1949, "Hollywood careers are perishable commodities", and sought to avoid such a fate for herself. 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."

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.

Citizenship She became an American citizen in June 1948.

Politics She supported the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

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.

Influences and legacy Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker (1953) was the first American film noir directed by a woman. Lupino learned filmmaking from everyone she observed on set, including William Ziegler, the cameraman for Not Wanted. When in preproduction on Never Fear, she conferred with Michael Gordon on directorial technique, organization, and plotting. Cinematographer Archie Stout said of Ms. Lupino, "Ida has more knowledge of camera angles and lenses than any director I've ever worked with, with the exception of Victor Fleming. She knows how a woman looks on the screen and what light that woman should have, probably better than I do." Lupino also worked with editor Stanford Tischler, who said of her, "She wasn't the kind of director who would shoot something, then hope any flaws could be fixed in the cutting room. The acting was always there, to her credit." On whether Lupino should be considered a feminist filmmaker, Scheib states, "I don't think Lupino was concerned with showing strong people, men or women. She often said that she was interested in lost, bewildered people, and I think she was talking about the postwar trauma of people who couldn't go home again."

Lupino did not consider herself a feminist, saying, "I had to do something to fill up my time between contracts. Keeping a feminine approach is vital – men hate bossy females ... Often I pretended to a cameraman to know less than I did. That way I got more cooperation."

Eddie Muller is a fan: Although her ambition exceeded her achievements, she left a body of work that proved her to be a capable director, a good writer, an excellent producer, and a superior actress. Most important, she was a total pro, and the most multitalented woman in the history of Hollywood.

Accolades

Lupino has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to the fields of television and film – located at 1724 Vine Street and 6821 Hollywood Boulevard. New York Film Critics Circle Award – Best Actress, The Hard Way, 1943 Inaugural Saturn Award - Best Supporting Actress, The Devil's Rain, 1975 A Commemorative Blue Plaque is dedicated to Lupino and her father Stanley Lupino by The Music Hall Guild of Great Britain and America and the Theatre and Film Guild of Great Britain and America at the house where she was born in Herne Hill, London, 16 February 2016 Composer Carla Bley paid tribute to Lupino with her jazz composition "Ida Lupino" in 1964. The Hitch-Hiker and Outrage were inducted into the National Film Registry in 1998 and 2020 respectively. Starring Ida Lupino, a series on the Criterion Channel in November 2024 starts with Lupino's story, followed by several of her films.

Align=center | 1957–1958 Align=center | Yes Eve Adams/Eve Drake Align=center | Yes Main cast (66 episodes); 1 episode 1958

Align=center | 1959 Align=center | Yes Barbara Jean Trenton "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine"

Align=center | 1959 Align=center | Yes Annie O'Toole "The Saga of Annie O'Toole"

Align=center | 1959 Align=center | Yes Herself "Lucy's Summer Vacation"

Align=center | 1960 Align=center | Yes Pamela Mann "Pamela's Oxen"

Align=center | 1961 Align=center | Yes "Assault"

Align=center | 1961 Align=center | Yes "The Last of the Sommervilles"

Align=center | 1961 Align=center | Yes "Something for Charity"

Align=center | 1963 Align=center | Yes Harriet Whitney "One Step Down"

Align=center | 1963 Align=center | Yes Helen Blaine "A Distant Fury"

Align=center | 1964 Align=center | Yes "The Masks"

Align=center | 1964 Align=center | Yes "Goodnight, Sweet Skipper"

Align=center | 1964 Align=center | Yes "Wrongway Feldman"

Align=center | 1965 Align=center | Yes "A is for Aardvark"

Align=center | 1965 Align=center | Yes "How Brillig, O, Beamish Boy"

Align=center | 1966 Align=center | Yes "The Producer"

Align=center | 1968 Align=center | Yes Doctor Schneider "Turnabout"

Align=center |1968 Align=center |Yes "Doctor Cassandra" Spellcraft "The Entrancing Dr. Cassandra"

Align=center | 1969 Align=center | Yes Lady "Maudie" Marchwood "Maudie" Scope="row" | Family Affair Align=center | 1970 Align=center | Yes Lady "Maudie" Marchwood "Return of Maudie"

Align=center | 1972 Align=center | Yes Roger Stanford's Aunt "Short Fuse"

Align=center | 1973 Align=center | Yes Wilma Jamison "Blockade"

Align=center | 1974 Align=center | Yes Mrs. Edna Brown "Swan Song"

Align=center | 1975 Align=center | Yes Hilda Morris "The Chasers"

Align=center | 1977 Align=center | Yes Gloria Gibson "I Will Be Remembered"

Radio appearances Year Program Episode/source 1937 The Chase and Sanborn Hour 1937 Lux Radio Theatre The 39 Steps 1938 The Silver Theatre Challenge for Three 1939 The Campbell Playhouse The Bad Man 1939 The Chase and Sanborn Hour 1939 Lux Radio Theatre Wuthering Heights 1939 Woodbury's Hollywood Playhouse For All Our Lives 1940 Lux Radio Theatre The Young in Heart 1940 Good News of 1940 The Light That Failed 1940 Lux Radio Theatre Wuthering Heights 1940 Lux Radio Theatre Rebecca 1942 Charlie McCarthy Show 1942 It's Time to Smile 1942 Lux Radio Theatre A Woman's Face 1943 Lux Radio Theatre Now, Voyager 1943 Lux Radio Theatre Ladies in Retirement 1943 Duffy's Tavern 1943 Command Performance 1943 Burns and Allen 1944 Everything for the Boys The Citadel 1944 Mail Call 1944 Screen Guild Players High Sierra 1944 Suspense The Sisters 1944 Suspense Fugue in C Minor 1944 This Is My Best Brighton Rock 1945 Cavalcade of America Immortal Wife 1945 Lux Radio Theatre Only Yesterday 1945 Screen Guild Players Pillow to Post 1946 Cavalcade of America Star in the West 1946 Theatre of Romance The Hard Way 1946 Encore Theatre Nurse Edith Cavell 1946 Tell Me a Story The Pond 1947 Cavalcade of America Abigail Opens the White House 1947 Cavalcade of America A Lady of Distinction 1947 Cavalcade of America Kitchen Scientist 1947 Lux Radio Theatre The Seventh Veil 1947 Lux Radio Theatre Saratoga Trunk 1948 Lux Radio Theatre Daisy Kenyon 1948 Suspense Summer Night 1948 Lux Radio Theatre The Razor's Edge 1948 Hallmark Playhouse Woman with a Sword 1949 Bill Stern Colgate Sports Newsreel 1949 Suspense The Bullet 1950 Hollywood Calling 1950 Hallmark Playhouse The Love Story of Elizabeth Barrett 1953 Guest Star Fear 1953 Stars over Hollywood Chasten Thy Son 1954 Lux Radio Theatre The Star 1954 Lux Radio Theatre So Big 1959 Suspense On a Country Road