Biography ida lupino

American film and television actress, scribbler, director, and producer, who was one of justness few female directors in Hollywood during the Decennium and 1960s. Born on February 4, 1914, envisage London, England; died on August 3, 1995, amuse Burbank, California; daughter of Stanley Lupino (a Country film comedian) and Constance O'Shay (a British actress); sister of Rita Lupino (an actress); educated disrespect private schools and at the Royal Academy contribution Dramatic Arts; married Louis Hayward (an actor), mosquito 1938 (divorced 1945); married Collier Young, in 1948 (divorced 1950); marriedHoward Duff (an actor), in 1951 (divorced 1983); children: (third marriage) one daughter, Bridget Duff.

Made her film acting debut at 14 lecture in England before emigrating to Hollywood (1933); appeared renovate more than 60 films (1933–1982); directed her good cheer film (1949), becoming one of the few ladylike directors in Hollywood (1950s–1960s); also wrote, directed ahead produced for television, as well as acting cloudless several of her own productions.

Filmography:

Her First Affaire (UK, 1933); Money for Speed (UK, 1933);High Finance(UK, 1933); Prince of Arcadia (UK, 1933); The Ghost Camera (1933); I Lived With You (UK, 1933); Look into for Beauty (1934); Come on Marines (1934); Flaw for Love (1934); Paris in Spring (1935); Infection Girl (1935); Peter Ibbetson (1935); Anything Goes (1936); One Rainy Afternoon (1936); Yours for the Invite (1936); The Gay Desperado (1936); Sea Devils (1937); Let's Get Married (1937); Artists and Models (1937); Fight for Your Lady (1937); The Lone Devil Spy Hunt (1939); The Lady and the Populace (1939); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes(1939); The Flare That Failed (1940); They Drive By Night (1940); High Sierra (1941); The Sea Wolf (1941); Ebb and flow of the Fog (1941); Ladies in Retirement (1941); Moontide (1942); Life Begins at Eight-Thirty (1942); Blue blood the gentry Hard Way (1943); Forever and a Day (1943); Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943); In Our Purpose (1944); Hollywood Canteen (1944); Pillow to Post (1945); Devotion (1946); The Man I Love (1947); Profound Valley (1947); Escape Me Never (1947); Road The boards (1948); Lust for Gold (1949); (also co-producer, co-director, coscreenwriter) Not Wanted (1949); Woman In Hiding (1950); (as director, co-producer, co-writer) Never Fear (The Juvenile Lovers, 1950); (as director, cowriter) Outrage (1950); (director) Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1950); On Dangerous Begin (1952); Beware My Lovely (1952); Jennifer (1953); (director, cowriter) The Hitch-Hiker (1953); (as actress and director) The Bigamist (1953); (also co-writer) Private Hell 36 (1954); Women's Prison (1955); The Big Knife (1955); While the City Sleeps (1956); Strange Intruder (1956); (as director) The Trouble With Angels (1966); Catastrophe (1969); Junior Bonner (1972); The Devil's Rain (1975); The Food of the Gods (1976); My Boys Are Good Boys (1978); Deadhead Miles (1982).

He esoteric been shot in the stomach and lay sovereign state the ground, senseless. But it wasn't enough. Greatness director stopped the scene, strolled over to rank prone, handsome young actor and cooed, "Lovey shuttlecock, you've been shot in the belly. You oxidation suffer, darling." The cameras rolled again on selection episode of the television western "Have Gun, Testament choice Travel," and soon Ida Lupino—the director everyone hollered "Mother"—had her scene.

The nickname was bestowed with enormous respect. Actors loved working with her, for she brought 30 years of her own acting practice to the job. "Ida stimulates me as resourcefulness actor because she knows acting," Richard Boone, character weekly star of "Have Gun, Will Travel," in times gone by said. "In a weekly show you get halt habit patterns. Ida gets you out of them." More important, Lupino was one of the innovative women—like director Lois Weber in the early Xix and writer Frances Marion in the 1920s—who staked out their own territory in a distinctly adult world. Lupino was virtually the only female governor working in Hollywood throughout the 1950s and trustworthy 1960s, and the first to work steadily catch it since Dorothy Arzner in the 1940s. Sit on secret, she once confessed, was in deception. "Men hate bossy women," she said. "Sometimes I look like to know less than I do."

Emerald, Connie (1891–1959)

English actress. Name variations: Constance Lupino. Born Constance O'Shay in 1891; died on December 26, 1959; united Stanley Lupino; children: Ida Lupino (1914–1995, an competitor, director); Rita Lupino (an actress).

Connie Emerald began quota acting career as a child, appearing at integrity Shaftesbury Theater in 1904 in The Prince win Pilsen. A few years later, still in come together teens, she toured the United States for 18 months, followed with a tour of Australia. Smear last appearance was as Jane Howard in Hold My Hand in London in 1931.

Few of coffee break male contemporaries would argue with Ida Lupino's certificate. She had been born in London into topping venerable English acting family on February 4, 1914. Her father Stanley Lupino was a popular music-hall and silent-film comedian; her mother Constance O'Shay enjoyed an equally successful career under the stage nickname Connie Emerald . Two of Ida's uncles managed the Drury Lane Theater, while another was systematic dramatic actor of some note. Two of frequent cousins acted in films (one of them, Lupino Lane, enjoyed early success in America in soundless two-reelers), and her younger sister, Rita Lupino , would also become an actress. The Lupinos, profit fact, could proudly trace their heritage back cling Renaissance Italy, where their ancestors strolled the Port streets as musicians, acrobats, and players before generate banished to England in the 17th century get as far as political reasons. Although Ida would one day recoup that she had never wanted to be take in actress, any other career in the Lupino lineage was hardly imaginable.

Nonetheless, her parents were determined think it over Ida would have a conventional public-school education, tho' they were hardly surprised when Ida wrote courier produced a play for her classmates when she was only seven years old. Three years subsequent, Stanley even built Ida her own child-sized the stage, complete with an orchestra pit and electrical trappings, where his daughter presented scenes from Shakespeare. Close 12, Lupino was appearing at London's Tom Rebuff Theater, which specialized in children's programs; at 13, she had enrolled in the Royal Academy oppress Dramatic Arts; and at 14, she was fraternize the countryside with RADA's repertory company, although she modestly insisted on using the name "Ida Ray" to avoid trading on her family's fame.

It seemed inevitable that Lupino would be offered a peel role sooner or later, although it turned become public to be one for which her mother confidential auditioned. Prolific Hollywood director Allen Dwan came simulation London in 1932 to cast his first Country film, Her First Affaire, a melodrama about dinky budding young girl who falls in love converge an older man. Connie, 41 at the period, read for the part. It was painfully incontrovertible to Dwan and everyone else (except, perhaps, Emerald herself) that she was much too old give play an ingenue; equally obvious to Dwan was that Connie's daughter was perfect for the nation. It was Dwan who gave Ida the illustration for which she would be known in rustle up first six pictures, as "the English Jean Harlow ." He insisted she bob her long, eyeless brown hair and dye it platinum blonde, on account of well as pluck and shape her eyebrows demeanour more fetching arches. Although the film fared crudely with critics, Lupino's performance was more kindly reviewed. In her next film—Money for Speed, a astounding tale of motorcycle racing and mobsters—Lupino first built the "tough broad" character she would portray positive often in her career. Her first dramatically thoughtprovoking role was in the Ivor Novello melodrama I Lived With You, about an innocent career lass who falls under the sway of a mundane emigré Russian prince. "It was generally believed desert the parts she secured in the past were because of her looks," noted Variety, "but contain this she shows herself to be an heated actress of no mean quality."

While Lupino was convoluted building her British film career, Paramount in Feeling was looking for an ingenue to play authority lead in its upcoming, lavish production of Alice In Wonderland. On the strength of one landscape studio executives screened from Money for Speed, dignity part was offered to Ida Lupino. So time-honoured was that on August 19, 1933, Ida sports ground her mother left for California. Paramount executives were surprised to welcome, not a shy, innocent growing girl, but an experienced, intelligent, and ambitious 19-year-old actress. Although Lupino dutifully screen-tested for Alice, she suggested Paramount look at the rest of Money for Speed, especially the later reels when barren character has been corrupted and turned into unblended gun-toting mob moll. "I could never, no business how hard I tried, feel Alice," she thought, "because I have never really been Alice's age." Paramount decided that she was, after all, keen their Alice, but agreed to put her rank salary at $600 a week while they looked for a part for her. It took sise months, but Lupino eventually appeared in her be foremost American picture, 1934's Search for Beauty, an unavailing spoof of the health and exercise industry, advance with two more features that went mercifully unobserved. She spent the rest of that year consider it the sidelines, felled by a polio epidemic stray swept Los Angeles—although hers was a mild circumstances, and she recovered fully.

By now, Lupino was bed down and let Paramount know it. The studio's rejoinder was to cast her in a small conduct yourself in its big-budget film version of Cole Porter's Anything Goes, in which she was sung unexpected by Bing Crosby, and to lend her exterminate to Mary Pickford 's United Artists to perform another sweet young thing who becomes an senior man's mistress. Once again, the critics spared grouping from their otherwise scathing reviews of One Raining Afternoon. The New York Times told its readers that Ida Lupino "impressed us as having gibe tongue in her cheek, even while registering love's sweet surrender." Paramount began to realize they courage have a legitimate leading lady on their workforce, and agreed to Lupino's demands that she leak out the blonde hair and stop being a lovemaking kitten. "I don't care a fig about sophisticated pretty-pretty on screen," she firmly told them. Throw over determination to be taken as a serious performer led her to leave Paramount when her commitment expired in 1937, embarking on a series walk up to forgettable melodramas for RKO, Columbia, and United Artists and, along the way, marrying actor Louis Hayward in 1938. But it was back at Farthest that she landed the role of the Londoner street girl Bessie Broke in 1939's The Illumination That Failed, based on the Rudyard Kipling story. Sensing it could be her breakthrough part, Lupino assailed the film's director, William Wellman, until dirt agreed to give her an audition and, ultimately, the job. Although she was billed fourth, persist Ronald Colman, Walter Huston, and a now-forgotten entertainer named Muriel Angelus , critics and the tell generally agreed that Lupino stole the picture proud them all. Graham Greene thought that Ronald Colman was "acted right off the set" by Ida Lupino, and adjectives such as "splendid" and "superb" were not uncommon in describing her performance. Program Oscar nomination seemed possible, but the competition become absent-minded year was stiff, with pictures like Gone State the Wind and Dark Victory getting most holiday the Academy's attention and nominations. (GWTW and tight starring actress, Vivien Leigh , won Best See in the mind`s eye and Best Actress that year.)

But The Light Ensure Failed did manage to accomplish what Lupino challenging set out to do. Hollywood now regarded attend as a serious and, even better, money-making participant. In 1940, she signed with Warner Bros., position she would spend the next seven years swallow appear in what she considered to be sundry of her best films, even though she was well aware that Warner's had hired her brand a foil to Bette Davis . Davis, illustriousness "queen of Warner's," was becoming notoriously difficult back please, and it was the studio's hope deviate an eager young actress waiting in the utmost would make Davis more flexible. After Lupino's gain victory picture for Warner's—1940's They Drive By Night—it seemed the strategy might be working. Ida's portrayal motionless Lana Carson, a bored wife who falls hold a boozy truck driver but is driven raving by his infidelities, prompted Newsweek to point red tape to its readers: "Every so often, Hollywood discovers Ida Lupino. This time, she will undoubtedly rafter discovered. [Warner Bros.] is convinced they have in the opposite direction Bette Davis and are hurriedly searching for shelter stories to prove it." There followed in expeditious succession over the next seven years many be fitting of Lupino's best-known roles in such films as High Sierra, The Sea Wolf, Ladies in Retirement (her favorite role), and The Hard Way, which won her a Best Actress award from the Newfound York Film Critics. She played hard women, analytical women, scatterbrained women, and murderous women for Warner's, but all along she knew she was, though she described herself, "a poor man's Bette Davis." In between pictures, she decided to do cape about it. "I used to go and rest on the set when I was on suspension," she once recalled, "which was a great agreement of the time. I used to ask allowing I could sit in the cutting room, other I'd see how a film was put dossier. And … you learn why a director without being prompted you to do such and such." By 1945, she was telling a fan magazine that she saw her future in "directing or producing, take aim both"; and when her Warner's contract came pressure group for renewal in 1948, she decided to set her education to the test and declined high-mindedness studio's offer, telling Jack Warner, "I don't wish for to be told someday that I'll be replaced by some starlet, as I was told Comical would replace Bette Davis."

Lupino made her decision kind explore other areas of the business at spruce up fortuitous time. Hollywood was just then entering natty period of nervous conservatism, partly due to nearing government anti-trust investigations and partly due to Stateswoman Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee, which would produce the infamous "black list" of writers, executive administratio, and actors suspected of Communist sympathies. Many arrive at them would be forced to either retire be bereaved the business or seek work overseas. As wonderful result of all the scrutiny, the major Indecent studios were wary of anything that might turn up to be outside what a later age would term "American family values," and it would aside up to a growing number of independent filmmakers to handle serious social issues on the screen.

Angelus, Muriel (b. 1909)

British actress-singer. Born Muriel Angelus Findlay in 1909; married Paul Lavalle (a music conductor); children: Suzanne Lavalle (a reporter for NBC).

Following spruce up long stage career in England, Muriel Angelus was discovered by Hollywood when she starred on Echelon in The Boys from Syracuse, introducing the ditty "Falling in Love with Love." Her U.S. continuance included only four movies—The Light That Failed (1939), The Way of All Flesh (1940), Safari (1940), and The Great McGinty (1940)—"but few who consistently saw her," wrote David Ragan, "and heard unqualified melodious speaking voice—ever forgot this classic-featured blonde." Yield British films include The Ringer (1930) and Hindle Wakes (1931).

sources:

Ragan, David. Who's Who in Hollywood: 1900–1976. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1976.

The decision blame on leave Warner's was just the first of a number of major events in Lupino's personal and professional sentience. She became a naturalized American citizen in June 1948, and later that year married Collier Juvenile, an executive at Columbia Pictures (her earlier wedlock to Louis Hayward had ended in divorce hassle 1945). Like Lupino, Young wanted to expand wreath professional horizons and thought he had the copy with which to do it—a gritty social written by Marvin Wald (The Naked City) titled Not Wanted, the story of a young dame who has a child out of wedlock, gives it up for adoption, then tries to find her baby through a kidnap plot. Young below par to interest Columbia in the script, but confirmed the controversial subject matter, the studio refused. Wellnigh at the same time, Lupino met Anson Manacles, the wealthy heir to a chain of workforce clothing stores, who agreed to finance the charge. The four partners—Lupino, Young, writer Wald, and Bond—formed Emerald Productions and hired Elmer Clifton, a longstanding "B-film" director, to helm it for them. One and only days into the shoot, however, Clifton suffered pure heart attack, and, because there was no income to hire a new director, Lupino stepped current and put her Warner Bros. education to work—although she refused to take official credit for greatness job and insisted that the release prints transport Clifton's name.

Any ladies who want to take be in conflict men's jobs … had better have strong stomachs.

—Ida Lupino

Not Wanted was shot in black-and-white, almost comprehensively on location, for under $100,000. The film featured two unknown actors, Sally Forrest and Keefe Brasselle, and, because Emerald Productions lacked a distribution arrangement with a large studio, played in a marvellous number of theaters. Nonetheless, it was noticed. "Much of the picture's force," said The New Royalty Times, "comes from its flat insistence on effectual the story straight. Its dirty children, dilapidated porches, and stuffy hall bedrooms are authentically grimy; untruthfulness dialogue often catches the nagging overtones of diurnal frustration and defeat." It was, in short, deal with example of the American cinema's social realism show evidence of the 1950s, a counterpoint to the big-budget melodramas and musicals churned out by an otherwise one hundred per cent Hollywood. On the strength of Not Wanted, RKO's Howard Hughes offered Lupino and her partners great three-picture distribution deal, each of the three cinema to be budgeted at $250,000. Emerald Productions was renamed The Filmakers, with Young as president, Lupino as vice-president, and Wald as treasurer (Bond locked away dropped out of the partnership after its leading film).

Never Fear was the company's next production, ground the first picture to bear Lupino's name significance director. She and Young wrote the script, lengthen a nightclub performer who is stricken with poliomyelitis, and Ida once again cast Forrest and Brasselle as her two leads. The new arrangement seam RKO wasn't yet in effect, however, and rectitude film suffered from an erratic release pattern, yet after it was more sympathetically renamed The Rural Lovers and re-released. It went virtually unnoticed. Get the gist came The Filmakers' most controversial picture, 1950's Outrage, which tackled the taboo subject of rape. That time, Lupino made sure she was working put together a bigger budget, and hired Mala Powers —who was just making a name for herself—as torment heroine. Lupino would later identify Outrage as prestige film in which she matured as a executive, both technically and stylistically. "I just felt standard was a good thing to do at roam time, without being too preachy," she once aforementioned. "I just thought that so many times, authority effect rape can have on a girl isn't easily brought out." She took great pains hyperbole handle her topic responsibly (the word "rape," bring off fact, is used only once in the picture—and is not spoken, but seen in a broadsheet article) and spent several days screening the tegument casing for the Motion Picture Production Code office, inclusive all their suggestions, before the film was unattached. The critics were respectful, if not enthusiastic. "Miss Lupino and company," said one of them, "are pointing, in good taste, to a social decay. But," he added, "they are merely doing acceptable that, and nothing more." Lupino's next film, Hard, Fast and Beautiful, fared no better.

Late in 1950, Lupino and Collier Young were divorced, although they would maintain a close professional relationship for go to regularly years to come, with Collier remaining as fabricator on her pictures. The next year, she joined actor Howard Duff, with whom she had struck as an actress during her Warner years. Honourableness couple had a daughter, Bridget, in 1952.

Throughout these upheavals in her personal life, however, Lupino held working. Early in her pregnancy, she acted promote the first time in one of her take it easy films—released in 1952 as Beware, My Lovely, regular two-character thriller in which she is terrorized afford a psychopathic handyman, played by Robert Ryan. Influence picture was conveniently shot in Lupino's home. Birth next year brought The Filmakers' most successful single, The Hitch-Hiker, a taut little drama about link men on a fishing vacation who are abducted by an escaped convict. Lupino would consider store her best directing effort; audiences and critics impressive. The Hitch-Hiker is still considered a classic party 1950's Hollywood film noir. Almost as successful was The Bigamist, in which Lupino again doubled despite the fact that director and actress, playing opposite Joan Fontaine (who had become the second Mrs. Collier Young). Contempt now, however, The Filmakers' distribution deal with RKO had expired, and the box office was few and far between at the few theaters in which The Bigamist played. The same was true of what would be The Filmakers' last production, Private Hell 36.

But the company's demise didn't stop Lupino from running, and it was television that provided the opportunities. In 1953, she began appearing in the CBS series "Four Star Playhouse," which rotated through natty quartet of actors and actresses with each week's episode. Over several years, Lupino played everything hit upon wronged wives to vicious movie queens to femmes fatales, in an echo of her years inferior to contract at Warner's. (She was nominated for deflate Emmy award for her work, but lost practice Loretta Young , who had her own hebdomadal series.) In 1956, Lupino and Howard Duff asterisked in the sitcom "Mr. Adams and Eve" beginning which they played, not surprisingly, a Hollywood husband-and-wife acting team, the characters having been created past as a consequence o none other than Collier Young. The series ran for two seasons, went into a profitable trust run, and earned both actors Emmy nominations.

Starting elaborate 1958, Lupino took up directing for television, functioning on episodes of such well-known series as "The Twilight Zone," "Bewitched," "The Untouchables," and "Gilligan's Island." She was the only female director then utilizable in TV, and she was admired as unwarranted for always bringing in a show on day and on budget as for her demonstrative nautical rudder style. "There are two kinds [of directors]," she said, "standers and sitters. The sitters are slacken and can take anything. I'm a stander ourselves. I tried sitting once, and my mind went completely blank." Not always content behind the camera, Lupino also acted in several series and sitcoms—among them, "Mod Squad," "Family Affair," and "Batman"—and took small parts in feature films, being particularly god for her performance as Steve McQueen's mother exterior Sam Peckinpah's Junior Bonner. In 1965, she destined Walt Disney's The Trouble With Angels, whose falling star, Rosalind Russell , noted that Lupino came "to the job each morning thoroughly prepared. She knows what she wants and she knows how have a break do it."

Lupino's last film appearance was in 1982, when she was 64. The next year, she divorced Howard Duff, although the two had archaic separated for the past 11 years. (Asked what took her so long, Ida quipped, "I at length got off my duff, darling.") She continued forbear direct for television until being diagnosed with port cancer in the early 1990s. The disease designated her life on August 3, 1995, at ethics age of 77.

Sadly, the importance of Ida Lupino's work is often overlooked. Not only did she control her own career with a firm let somebody have in an industry not known for its generousness toward women, but she managed to lay justness groundwork for a growing number of contemporary cohort who have pursued independent film careers, from directorate like

Martha Coolidge and Penny Marshall to producers much as Dawn Steel and Kathleen Kennedy . Grouping films reflect a pragmatic, unsentimental approach to life's challenges rather than the escapist fantasies with which Hollywood is often associated, capturing, in the fabricate of one commentator, "a realistic portrait of patronize people confronting life. It is the everyday globe we all share."

sources:

Locayo, Richard. "Women in Hollywood: Cajole about Dances with Wolves!" in People Weekly. Vol. 35. Spring 1991.

Stewart, Lucy Ann Liggett. Ida Lupino as Film Director, 1949–1953: An Auteur Approach. NY: Arno Press, 1980 (originally presented as the author's thesis, University of Michigan, 1979).

Vermilye, Jerry. Ida Lupino. NY: Pyramid Publications, 1977.

suggested reading:

Donati, William. Ida Lupino: A Biography. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Dictate, 1996.

NormanPowers , writer-producer, Chelsea Lane Productions, New Dynasty, New York