Ida Lupino

Biography: A fine actress and pioneering but often overlooked director of film and television, Ida Lupino first dreamed of becoming a writer, but not wanting to disappoint her music hall comedian father Stanley Lupino and her actress mother Connie Emerald, entered show business instead. Lupino did not start out wanting to become a director either, but after years of building a reputation as an excellent actress specializing in playing tough, emotional film noir femmes, she tired of being controlled by others and turned to filmmaking. She was the only woman to make feature films in the 1950s; if one adds her feature films to her television directorial efforts, Lupino remains the most prolific female director in history. Some of the techniques she used in her projects are still considered ahead of their time. Over her five-decade-long career, Lupino earned different monikers. While undergoing training at England's prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, her agent groomed her to be "theA fine actress and pioneering but often overlooked director of film and television, Ida Lupino first dreamed of becoming a writer, but not wanting to disappoint her music hall comedian father Stanley Lupino and her actress mother Connie Emerald, entered show business instead. Lupino did not start out wanting to become a director either, but after years of building a reputation as an excellent actress specializing in playing tough, emotional film noir femmes, she tired of being controlled by others and turned to filmmaking. She was the only woman to make feature films in the 1950s; if one adds her feature films to her television directorial efforts, Lupino remains the most prolific female director in history. Some of the techniques she used in her projects are still considered ahead of their time. Over her five-decade-long career, Lupino earned different monikers. While undergoing training at England's prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, her agent groomed her to be "the next Janet Gaynor" and steered her toward ingénue roles. She was 15 and still enrolled at RADA when Allan Dwan gave her a small role in Her First Affair (1932). At the time, glamour was in, so Lupino dyed her dark tresses blonde, wore heavy makeup and was billed as "The English Jean Harlow." But the nickname didn't quite fit, for even at this early stage, Lupino conveyed a toughness that belied her tender age. Hollywood's Paramount Pictures discovered Lupino after they saw her in a partial viewing of Money for Speed (1933). In this film, she played a dual part as a demure blonde and a streetwise prostitute (a role she had essayed numerous times before in school). Having only seen Lupino in the former parts, Paramount executives enthusiastically signed her to a contract and announced plans to star her in Alice in Wonderland. But in the screen test, she proved a bit too jaded to play the innocent dreamer and Paramount found itself with an actress who didn't quite fit the frothy roles in which she was subsequently cast. The future of her acting career looked bleak until Lupino followed Hedda Hopper's advice and eschewed glamour for a more natural appearance more suited to her acting style. The ploy worked and after a dry spell of about 18 months, she returned to work. In 1938, Lupino moved to Warner Bros. and appeared in They Drive By Night. More meaty and gritty roles followed and by the early '50s, Lupino was calling herself "a poor man's Bette Davis." Her breakthrough role was that of the tough-but-loyal Marie opposite rising star Humphrey Bogart's fleeing killer Roy Earle in Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941). Lupino continued specializing in crime dramas, thrillers, and film noir after leaving Warners in 1947, following her appearance in the romantic drama Deep Valley. While freelancing as an actress, Lupino felt a growing discontent with merely receiving and following orders. She wanted more involvement in the filmmaking process, but in the conservative 1950s, her gender worked against her. Lupino's directing debut was more a matter of fortuitous circumstance than deliberate design. It happened in 1949, when director Elmer Clifton suffered a heart attack and had to abandon Not Wanted, a melodramatic story about an unwed mother co-authored by Lupino. After Clifton left, Lupino took up the reins. Over the next six years, she would write and direct as many features and star in seven more. In subject, Lupino's films have been compared to those of early feminist director Lois Weber, in that they both focused on controversial or socially relevant topics, but unlike Weber, Lupino's primary goal was entertainment, not education. Her next film, the first which she directed from start to finish, was Outrage; it offered a rather heavy-handed but forward-looking account of a young woman whose reputation is destroyed by rape. Like subsequent efforts, it was made without major stars, on a limited budget, through Lupino's own production company The Filmmakers, which she established in 1949. As a director, Lupino eschewed the feminist label. Though she consistently demonstrated the strength and tenacity to remain viable in a male-dominated world, she preferred the complex art of feminine manipulation of her male colleagues to the direct approach. She was delighted that the back of her director's chair had the words "The Mother of All of Us" painted upon it and never hesitated to present herself as the gentle matriarch on the set. But while she could be downright demure with men, Lupino could be admittedly ruthless when dealing with women wanting to break into filmmaking. She would not soften on the subject of women making movies until the early '70s, when she claimed that she would be willing to work with other talented females if it was on a mutually agreeable subject. Following her marriage to her third husband, actor Howard Duff in 1951 (she had previously been married to actors Louis Hayward from 1938 to 1945 and Collier Young from 1948 to 1951), Lupino spent an increasing amount of time promoting Duff's career, until their divorce in 1973. It was a decision that biographers and spokespersons for Lupino claimed that she secretly regretted, even though publicly she would state, as she had been claiming throughout her career, that womanly concerns such as keeping house, home, and femininity were always more important than her professional career. In addition to acting, screenwriting, directing, and producing films, Lupino was also a talented singer and a gifted composer of songs, as well as the occasional score. When Lupino's production company went belly-up in 1954, she began directing television shows, specializing in action fare, Westerns, and horror tales on series like The Fugitive, Gunsmoke, and Thriller. From the mid '50s through the early '70s, Ida Lupino worked on over 30 series and directed at least a hundred, probably more, episodes. She also continued a sporadic acting career. Both basically ended in the early '70s, by which time Lupino's contribution to cinema was largely forgotten. Fortunately, the quality of her earlier work, both in front of and behind the camera were rediscovered in the 1990s and Ida Lupino's work is treated with even more respect than it garnered when it was new.… Expand