Ida Lupino

Ida was born in London to a show business family. In 1932, her mother brought Ida with her to an audition and Ida got the part her mother wanted.

The picture was Her First Affaire (1932).

Arrived in the U.S. from England aboard the RMS Berengaria at New York on August 25, 1933 at age 15. At age ten, Lupino asked her father to construct a theater for her and her sister. The project resulted in an elaborate structure with electrical equipment, a pit, and seating for a hundred.

Ida, a bleached blonde, came to Hollywood in 1934 and played small and insignificant parts.

Peter Ibbetson (1935) was one of her few noteworthy movies and it was not until The Light That Failed (1939) that she got a chance to get better parts. In most of her movies, she was cast as the hard, but sympathetic woman from the wrong side of the tracks.

In The Sea Wolf (1941) and High Sierra (1941), she played the part magnificently. It has been said that no one could do hard-luck dames the way Lupino could do them. She played tough, knowing characters who held their own against some of the biggest leading men of the day - Humphrey Bogart, Ronald Colman, John Garfield and Edward G. Robinson.

Lupino was originally scheduled to play Cassandra Tower in Kings Row (1942), but when Warner Brothers decided to loan her to 20th Century-Fox for two films, she was replaced by Betty Field.

In Italy, most of her films were dubbed by either Lydia Simoneschi, Renata Marini or Rosetta Calavetta. She was occasionally dubbed by Clelia Bernacchi, most notably in Hollywood Canteen (1944).

She made a handful of films during the forties playing different characters ranging from Pillow to Post (1945), where she played a traveling saleswoman to the tough nightclub singer in The Man I Love (1946). But good roles for women were hard to get and there were many young actresses and established stars competing for those roles.

She left Warner Brothers in 1947 and became a freelance actress. When better roles did not materialize, Ida stepped behind the camera as a director, writer and producer.

Her first directing job came when director Elmer Clifton fell ill on a script that she co-wrote Not Wanted (1949). Ida had joked that as an actress, she was the poor man's Bette Davis. Now, she said that as a director, she became the poor man's Don Siegel. The films that she wrote, or directed, or appeared in during the fifties were mostly inexpensive melodramas.

Became lifelong friends with Mala Powers (whom she directed in Outrage (1950)). When Lupino died in 1995, Powers was named the executor of her estate. Lupino was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

At age 34, Lupino gave birth to her only child, a daughter Bridget Mirella Duff (aka Bridget Duff) on April 23, 1952. Bridget's father was Lupino's third husband, actor Howard Duff. Bridget Duff weighed only 4 pounds at birth and almost died.

Although accomplished as both a director and an actress, she preferred to keep these two functions separate, with The Bigamist (1953) being the exception in which she both starred and directed.

She was the only person to both appear in and direct episodes of The Twilight Zone (1959), acting in The Twilight Zone: The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine (1959) and directing The Twilight Zone: The Masks (1964). She was also the only woman to have directed an episode of the series.

Richard Boone told columnist Erskine Johnson in 1961 about her skills as a director, "Ida stimulates me as an actor because she knows acting. In a weekly show, you get into acting patterns. Ida gets you out of them.".

Musician Paul Bley recorded a song in honor of her entitled "Ida Lupino", composed by his then-wife Carla Bley, for his 1965 album "Closer".

Profiled in "Killer Tomatoes: Fifteen Tough Film Dames" bu Ray Hagen and Laura Wagner (McFarland, 2004).

Her image appears on the cover of the music CD Electro Swing VIII released in 2015.

Lupino's house on Weddington St. in the Valley Village area of North Hollywood is shown in Hollywood Mouth 3 (2018). The trailer for that film, "The Parallel Universe of Noir," concludes with the same house, followed by director Jordan Mohr setting up a shot. (An earlier Lupino residence, Ravenswood Apartments, is also shown in "Hollywood Mouth 3.").