Ida Lupino - Acting Career

Acting Career

Lupino was born in 1918 into an English family of performers. Her father, Stanley Lupino, was a music hall comedian, and her mother, Connie Emerald (1892–1959), was an actress. As a girl, Ida Lupino was encouraged to enter show business by both her parents and her uncle, Lupino Lane, who was also in show business as an acrobatic film and stage comic and director. At the mere age, of seven, Lupino wrote the play Mademoiselle for a school production, which she also starred in. She trained at RADA, where she stayed for two terms and made her first film appearance in The Love Race (1931), the next year making Her First Affaire, a film her mother originally tested for. She played leading roles in five British films in 1933 at Warner Bros.' Teddington studios and for Julius Hagen at Twickenham, including in The Ghost Camera with John Mills and I Lived with You with Ivor Novello. She moved to Hollywood at the end of that year for the opportunity to play the lead role in "Alice in Wonderland". (1933)

Lupino starred in over a dozen films in the mid-1930s. She worked with Columbia in a two film deal, one of which being The Light That Failed (1939), a role she had acquired after running into the director’s office unannounced and demanding an audition. After this performance, she began to be taken seriously as a dramatic actress. As a result, her parts improved during the 1940s, and she described herself as "the poor man's Bette Davis." as she acquired the leftover roles that Bette Davis refused.

Mark Hellinger, associate producer at Warner Bros. was particularly impressed by this performance, and hired her for her next role in They Drive by Night (1940), a film that earned her a Warner’s Bros. contract, which she negotiated to include some free-lance rights. She starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in this film and High Sierra (1941). Warner Bros. received a great amount of defiance from Lupino, who refused roles that she felt were “beneath her dignity as an actress.” As a result, she spent a great deal of her time at Warner Bros. suspended. For her performance in The Hard Way (1943), she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. She starred in Pillow to Post (1945), which would be her only comedic role in her film history. She worked regularly and was in demand throughout the 1940s without becoming a major star until later. In 1947, Lupino left Warner Bros. after refusing to renew her contract. She then moved to Columbia Films, where she appeared in some notable films such as Road House and On Dangerous Ground before moving on to a directing career.