53 Facts About Ida Lupino

Ida Lupino was a British actress, director, writer, and producer.

Ida Lupino is widely regarded as the most prominent female filmmaker working in the 1950s during the Hollywood studio system.

Ida Lupino's short yet immensely influential directorial career, tackling themes of women trapped by social conventions, usually under melodramatic or noir coverings, is a pioneering example of proto-feminist filmmaking.

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

Ida Lupino was the only woman to direct an episode of the original The Twilight Zone series, and the only director to star in an episode.

Ida Lupino built a backyard theatre for Lupino and her sister Rita, who became an actress and dancer.

Ida Lupino wrote her first play at age seven and toured with a travelling theatre company as a child.

Ida Lupino wanted to be a writer, but in order to please her father, Lupino enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

Ida Lupino excelled in a number of "bad girl" film roles, often playing prostitutes.

Ida Lupino did not enjoy being an actress and felt uncomfortable with many of the early roles she was given.

Ida Lupino felt that she was pushed into the profession due to her family history.

Ida Lupino made her first film appearance in The Love Race and the following year, aged 14, she worked under director Allan Dwan in Her First Affaire, in a role for which her mother had previously tested.

Ida Lupino played leading roles in five British films in 1933 at Warner Bros.

Ida Lupino claimed the talent scouts saw her play only the sweet girl in the film and not the part of the prostitute, so she was asked to try out for the lead role in Alice in Wonderland.

Ida Lupino starred in over a dozen films in the mid-1930s, working with Columbia in a two-film deal, one of which, The Light That Failed, was a role she acquired after running into the director's office unannounced, demanding an audition.

The film did well and the critical consensus was that Ida Lupino stole the movie, particularly in her unhinged courtroom scene.

Ida Lupino worked with Walsh and Bogart again in High Sierra, where she impressed critic Bosley Crowther in her role as an "adoring moll".

Ida Lupino starred in Pillow to Post, which was her only comedic leading role.

Ida Lupino often incurred the ire of studio boss Jack Warner by objecting to her casting, refusing poorly written roles that she felt were beneath her dignity as an actress, and making script revisions deemed unacceptable by the studio.

In 1947, Ida Lupino left Warner Brothers and appeared for 20th Century Fox as a nightclub singer in the film noir Road House, performing her musical numbers in the film.

Ida Lupino starred in On Dangerous Ground in 1951, and may have taken on some of the directing tasks of the film while director Nicholas Ray was ill.

Ida Lupino described how bored she was on set while "someone else seemed to be doing all the interesting work".

The Filmakers produced 12 feature films, six of which Ida Lupino directed or co-directed, five of which she wrote or co-wrote, three of which she acted in, and one of which she co-produced.

Ida Lupino's best known directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker, a 1953 RKO release, is the only film noir from the genre's classic period directed by a woman.

Ida Lupino stepped in to finish the film without taking directorial credit out of respect for Clifton.

Ida Lupino once called herself a "bulldozer" to secure financing for her production company, but she referred to herself as "mother" while on set.

Ida Lupino's studio emphasized her femininity, often at the urging of Lupino herself.

Ida Lupino credited her refusal to renew her contract with Warner Bros.

Ida Lupino became a wily low-budget filmmaker, reusing sets from other studio productions and talking her physician into appearing as a doctor in the delivery scene of Not Wanted.

Ida Lupino used what is called product placement, placing Coca-Cola, United Airlines, Cadillac, and other brands in her films, such as The Bigamist.

Ida Lupino was acutely conscious of budget considerations, planning scenes in pre-production to avoid technical mistakes and retakes, and shooting in public places such as MacArthur Park and Chinatown to avoid set-rental costs.

Ida Lupino joked that if she had been the "poor man's Bette Davis" as an actress, she had now become the "poor man's Don Siegel" as a director.

The Filmakers production company ceased operations in 1955, and Ida Lupino turned almost immediately to television, directing episodes of more than thirty US TV series from 1956 through 1968.

Ida Lupino helmed a feature film in 1965 for the Catholic schoolgirl comedy The Trouble With Angels, starring Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell; this was Lupino's last theatrical film as a director.

Ida Lupino continued acting as well, going on to a successful television career throughout the 1960s and '70s.

From January 1957 to September 1958, Ida Lupino starred with her then-husband Howard Duff in the sitcom Mr Adams and Eve, in which the duo played husband-and-wife film stars named Howard Adams and Eve Drake, living in Beverly Hills, California.

Ida Lupino's final acting appearance was in the 1979 film My Boys Are Good Boys.

Ida Lupino has two distinctions with The Twilight Zone series, as the only woman to have directed an episode and the only person to have worked as both actor for one episode, and director for another.

Ahead of her time within the studio system, Ida Lupino was intent on creating films that were rooted in reality.

Ida Lupino rejected the commodification of female stars and as an actress, she resisted becoming an object of desire.

Ida Lupino said in 1949, "Hollywood careers are perishable commodities", and sought to avoid such a fate for herself.

Ida Lupino 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.

Ida Lupino worked for various nonprofit organizations to raise funds for polio research.

Ida Lupino composed it while recovering from polio in 1935.

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

Ida Lupino 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.

Ida Lupino died from a stroke while undergoing treatment for colon cancer in Los Angeles on 3 August 1995, at the age of 77.

Ida Lupino learned filmmaking from everyone she observed on set, including William Ziegler, the cameraman for Not Wanted.

Ida Lupino knows how a woman looks on the screen and what light that woman should have, probably better than I do.

Author Ally Acker compares Ida Lupino to pioneering silent-film director Lois Weber for their focus on controversial, socially relevant topics.

Ida Lupino often said that she was interested in lost, bewildered people, and I think she was talking about the postwar trauma of people who couldn't go home again.

Ida Lupino's work is resilient, with a remarkable empathy for the fragile and the heart-broken.

Ida Lupino directed or costarred a number of times with young, fellow British actresses on a similar journey of developing their American film careers like Hayley Mills and Pamela Franklin.