Ida Lupino

At 77 years old, Ida Lupino has this physical status:

Ida Lupino (4 February 1918 – 3 August 1995) was an English-American actress, singer, director, and producer.

She is widely regarded as one of the most prominent, and one of the only, female filmmakers working during the 1950s in 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 with The Hitch-Hiker in 1953. Throughout her 48-year career, she made acting appearances in 59 films and directed eight others, working primarily in the United States, where she became a citizen in 1948.

She also directed more than 100 episodes of television productions in a variety of genres including westerns, supernatural tales, situation comedies, murder mysteries, and gangster stories.

She was the only woman to direct episodes of the original The Twilight Zone series (most notably "The Masks"), as well as the only director to have starred in the show.

Early life and family

Lupino was born 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 (1920–2016), 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 each of Shakespeare's plays. After her intense 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 in order 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.

Personal life

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. The disease severely affected her ability to work, and her contract with Paramount fell apart shortly after her diagnosis. 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 Orcthira in 1937. She composed it while recovering from polio in 1935.

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

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 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.

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Career

Lupino appeared onstage and film as both a stage and film actress. In 1934, she appeared in The Pursuit of Happiness, the Paramount Studio Theatre's first woman on stage for the first time. Lupino appeared in The Love Race (1931) and the following year, aged 14, she worked under director Allan Dwan in Her First Affaire, a position for which her mother had never been tested. She appeared in five British films in 1933, including The Ghost Camera with John Mills and I Lived with You with Ivor Novello, in which she appeared in five British films, including The Ghost Camera with John Mills and Julius Hagen at Twickenham.

She was dubbed "the English Jean Harlow" by Paramount in 1933's Money for Speed, playing a good girl/bad girl dual role. Lupino claimed that the talent scouts saw her play only the sweet girl in the film, not the prostitute, so she was asked to audition for the lead role in Alice (1933). The Paramount producers didn't know what to do about their sultry potential leading lady when she first arrived in Hollywood, but she did get a five-year deal.

Lupino appeared in over a dozen films in the mid-1930s, two-film contract with Columbia, one of which, The Light That Failed (1939), was a role she took after running into the director's office unannounced, demanding an audition. She began to be recognized as a dramatic actress after her breakout role as a spiteful cockney model who mocks Ronald Colman. As a result, her roles improved during the 1940s, and Bette Davis, she jokingly referred to herself as "the poor man's Bette Davis" in reference to Davis' role.

Mark Hellinger, Warner Bros.'s associate producer, was captivated by Lupino's appearance in The Light That Fell (1940), opposite George Raft, Ann Sheridan, and Humphrey Bogart. Lupino stole the film, particularly in the unhinged courtroom scene, and the critical consensus was that the film did well. Warner Bros. offered her a deal in which she negotiated to include some freelance rights. In High Sierra (1941), she worked with Walsh and Bogart again, where she influenced critic Bosley Crowther in her role as a "adoring moll."

The New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress went to her performance in The Hard Way (1943). She appeared in Pillow to Post (1945), which was her first comedic leading role. Neither Warner Bros. nor Lupino wanted to renew her contract after the shooting in Deep Valley (1947) ended, and she left the studio in 1947. Despite being in high demand in the 1940s, she never rose to fame in her films, above actors such as Humphrey Bogart, and was consistently praised for her realistic, direct acting style.

She incurred a lot of studio manager Jack Warner's ire by protesting her casting, refusing poorly written roles that she felt were beneath her position as an actress, and making script revisions that were deemed unsuitable by the studio. As a result, she spent a considerable amount of her time at Warner Bros. She declined an invitation to work with Ronald Reagan in Kings Row in 1942 and was immediately banned from attending the film. A tentative rapprochement was eventually ended, but her relationship with the studio remained tense. Lupino left Warner Brothers in 1947 and appeared in the film noir Road House as a nightclub singer, despite her musical numbers in the film. She appeared on On Dangerous Ground in 1951 and may have taken on some of the film's directing duties when director Nicholas Ray was ill.

Lupino had ample time to watch filming and editing operations, and she became interested in directing when she was suspended. She described how bored she was on set, while "someone else seemed to be doing all the fun stuff."

Collier Young, a writer and writer, and her late husband, founded The Filmakers Inc. [sic], to "produce, direct, and write low-budget, issue-oriented films." Lupino, Collier Young as president, and screenwriter Malvin Wald as treasurer were among the group's founders in 1948. Lupino produced or co-directed six feature films, five of which Lupino wrote or co-directed, five of which she wrote or co-directed, three of which she co-produced, and three of which she co-produced. The Filmakers' aim was to make socially aware films, foster young talent, and bring realism to the screen. They set out to tell "how America lives" through independent B pictures shot in two weeks for less than $200,000, a mixture of "social significance" and entertainment. They investigated briefly taboo subjects, including rape (1950) and the self-explanatory The Bigamist (1953). At the time of its launch, the two had rave reviews, with Howard Thompson of The New York Times describing it as the "best offering to date" by the manufacturer. The Hitch-Hiker, Lupino's first film noir film noir directed by a woman, is Lupino's best known directorial effort.

Elmer Clifton's first directing job appeared in 1949 after she 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 from respect for Clifton. Despite the fact that the film's subject of out-of-wedlock pregnancy was controversial, it gained a lot of attention, and Eleanor Roosevelt was invited to discuss the film with Eleanor Roosevelt on a national radio station.

Never Fear (1949), a film about polio (which she had personally experienced at the age of 16, was her first director's credit. Howard Hughes, who was looking for low-budget feature films for distribution by his recently acquired RKO Pictures, noticed the film. Hughes agreed to fund and distribute The Filmakers' next three films through RKO, giving The Filmakers absolute control over the script and filmmaking. Lupino directed her first hard-paced, all-male cast film, making her the first female to direct a film noir after four others on social issues, including Outrage (1950), a film about rape.

Lupino used to get funding for her production company as a "bulldozer," but on set, she referred to herself as "mother." The back of her director's chair was labeled "Mother of Us All" on set. Lupino's studio emphasized her femininity, often at her request. "I had no idea that nothing lay ahead of me, but the life of the neurotic actress with no family and no home," she defended in defiance of her decision not to renew her Warner Bros. "Because being a man makes a big difference." she made a remark that she seemed nonthreatening in a male-dominated world. I don't think the guys are particularly concerned about leaving their wives and children. The wife can always fly over and be with him during the holiday season. A wife's words to her husband are traumatic, so sit on the set and watch."

Although acting became Lupino's passion, the quest for money kept her on camera, so she could continue to make her own films. In the Not Wanted production scene, she became a wily low-budget filmmaker, reusing sets from other studio sets and referring her doctor to being a doctor. In her films, including The Bigamist, she used what is now called product placement, including Coca-Cola, United Airlines, Cadillac, and other companies. She was acutely aware of budget issues, planning scenes in pre-production to prevent technical mistakes and retakes, and shooting in public places such as MacArthur Park and Chinatown to minimize set-rental prices. She mused that if she had been "poor man's Bette Davis" as an actor, she would now be "poor man's Don Siegel" as a director.

In 1955, the Filmakers manufacturing company ceased operations, and Lupino converted almost immediately to television, directing episodes of more than 30 US television shows from 1956 to 1968. Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell appeared in The Trouble With Angels, a Catholic schoolgirl comedy starring Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell; this was Lupino's last theatrical film as a director. She continued acting as well as embarking on a fruitful television career in the 1960s and 1970s.

Lupino's career as a director continued throughout 1968. Her directing efforts during those years were mainly for television productions like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, The Twilight Zone, Has Gun, Will Travel, Honey West, The Rifleman, Sam Benedict, The Untouchables, Hong Kong, The Fugitive, and Bewitched.

Lupino continued acting as an actor until the 1970s, mainly in television, following the demise of The Filmakers. Lupino appeared in 19 episodes of Four Star Playhouse from 1952 to 1956, a project involving Charles Boyer, Dick Powell, and David Niven. Lupino appeared in Mr. Adams and Eve, a film star in Beverly Hills, California, from January 1957 to September 1958, with her then-husband Howard Duff. In 1959, Duff and Lupino appeared in one of the 13 one-hour versions of The Lucy–Desi Comedy Hour and an episode of The Dinah Shore Chevy Show in 1959. In 1969, Lupino appeared in numerous television shows, including The Ford Television Theatre (1954), Bonanza (1959), and The Bachelor (1969) of The Villager (1969), The Burke family (1968), The Nanny and the Professor (1969); The Violin (1973), The Wizard and the Professor (1969), The Virgin (1976), and Charlie's Angels (1977). She made her last appearance in the film My Boys Are Good Boys, which was released in 1979.

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

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