Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino was only a young child when she lived on Old Fort Road at Shoreham beach, having been born in Herne Hill, London in 1918.

It was rumoured she had been born beneath a dining room table during a Zeppelin raid. She was the daughter of music hall comedian Stanley Lupino whose family owned a home in ‘Bungalow Town,’ the beach’s famous theatrical colony. He built a backyard theatre for her and her sister to perform in and encouraged her ambitions from an early age. At seven years old Ida Lupino wrote her first play and became part of a travelling theatre company while still a child.

Ida’s uncle was song and dance man Lupino Lane and he helped her moving into the film industry as an actor. She attended RADA and was appeared in her first film in 1931, aged fourteen. She was though more interested in becoming a writer. She contracted polio aged 16 but recovered and continued her career.

After playing leading roles in five British films, she was signed up by Paramount Studios and dubbed ‘The English Jean Harlow.’ In Hollywood she appeared in films including ‘Search For Beauty’ (1934 and ‘Anything Goes’ (1936).

In 1940 she appeared in the thriller ‘They Drive By Night’ alongside Humphrey Bogart, George Raft and Ann Sheridan. She was to star with Bogart again in ‘High Sierra’. She won the New York Critics Circle Award for Best Actress in ‘The Hard Way (1943). Although a successful film actor, Ida Lupino was often suspended by Warner Bros as she objected to the quality of some of the roles she was expected to take.

In 1948 with her husband Collier Young, Ida Lupino set up her own film company to make more realistic films that tackled the lives of ordinary people and social issues of the time. She was co-producing a film she had co-wrote called ‘Not Wanted’ when the director suffered a heart attack. She stepped in and finished directing the film but did not take a credit for it. Her first director’s credit was for ‘Never Fear’, a 1949 movie about polio. Howard Hughes was impressed by the film and offered to distribute her next three feature films through his RKO Pictures, leaving Lupino and Young control over subject matter and production.

She directed six films and wrote or co-wrote five of them, often focusing on issues concerning women. Her best-known film ‘The Hitch-Hiker’ made in 1953 is the only film noir of the time with a female director.

Ida Lupino continued acting to fund her films, but she was also resourceful in borrowing sets from other movies and was a pioneer in the area of product placement, persuading big brands to have their products appear in her movies for a fee.

From the mid 1950s Ida Lupino began directing for TV. There she became the only woman to direct an episode of the famous series ‘The Twilight Zone’. She also continued her successful acting career into the 1970s appearing in episodes of ‘Streets Of San Francisco’ and ‘Charlie’s Angels’. Admired by director Marin Scorsese, Ida Lupino had two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to film and TV. Ida Lupino died in Los Angeles on the 3rd August 1995.

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