Saturdays with the Stars: Ida Lupino

Each month of 2019 we will be looking at the careers of leading ladies of Classical Hollywood who were never nominated for an Academy Award as part of our "Saturdays with the Stars" series.  Last month, our focus was on Hedy Lamarr, a Hungarian actress  who worked briefly at MGM & was once considered, literally, "the most beautiful girl in the world."  This month, our penultimate month of this year's theme, we will turn to the actress my brother has been guessing would be the "Star of the Month" every month of this year, an actress who had a run as a leading lady for Warner Brothers even if she was never a major commercial success, but would later become one of the few women to have a career as a film director in the 1950's.  This month, our star is Ida Lupino.

Lupino seemed destined to end up in show business.  Her father was a comedian, and part of a famed theatrical family, while her mother was a British stage actress.  She longed to be a writer, but her father insisted she become an actress instead, and she showed a great aptitude for it, being a traveling performer in a theatrical troupe.  She eventually made it to Hollywood in 1933, but was in bit parts until a supporting role in The Light That Failed finally brought her to the attention of producers that she should be taken seriously as a dramatic actress (Lupino, notoriously witty, once claimed she was "the poor man's Bette Davis" since would frequently get the parts that Davis refused).

Her career in the 1940's was consistent leading work, but her star never approached someone like Davis's.  She would frequently charm critics with movies like They Drive By Night and The Hard Way, for which she won the New York Film Critics Circle Awards (Lupino, along with Tallulah Bankhead, Linda Fiorentino, Cameron Diaz, Hope Davis, & Regina Hall, is one of only six women to have ever received this distinction and not eventually gotten an Oscar nomination in their career, though the latter four are all still alive so they could remove themselves from this rarefied list).  Her biggest success, and the film that if she's known for anything as a film actress she's remembered still today, was High Sierra, which along with The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, in that same two-year time frame, made Humphrey Bogart into a proper movie star (at the time Bogart wasn't even famous enough to get top billing over Lupino).

Lupino's real claim to fame to modern cinephiles, though, happened in the 1950's, when she and her husband created an independent production company and Lupino became a film director, arguably the only significant female film director in Hollywood during this time period.  She hit a number of landmarks through doing this, becoming the first woman to direct a film noir (The Hitch-Hiker), the first woman to direct herself (The Bigamist), and the only person (man or woman) to both star in an episode of The Twilight Zone ("The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine") and direct one ("The Masks," one of my favorites in the series).  Her career eventually subsided, with her final directorial effort being the Hayley Mills picture The Trouble with Angels, and she died in 1978.  This month, we will focus on Lupino's career more as an actress, though we will also be watching The Bigamist to see her as both star and director, and looking at what critics celebrated (but audiences were largely ambivalent toward), and what ultimately financed the career of one of the few major female filmmakers of Hollywood's Golden Age.