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dulwichdiverter · 4 years

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Calling the shots

WORDS BY MARK BRYANT

Though she spent most of her career in the USA, the award-winning actress, singer, director and producer Ida Lupino (1918-95) was born in north Dulwich. As well as appearing in nearly 60 films, she was also a pioneering female cinema and television director who directed eight movies and more than 100 episodes of TV productions.

Ida was born on February 4, 1918 on Ardbeg Road. The road runs between Half Moon Lane and Red Post Hill and is close to North Dulwich station and James Allen’s Girls’ School.

In 2016 two commemorative blue plaques, to Ida and her father, were erected on the house in which she was born by the Theatre and Film Guild of Great Britain and America.

Originally intended to be named Aida (after the Verdi opera princess), Ida was the elder of two daughters of the music-hall comedian, actor, writer, singer and acrobat Stanley Lupino (Stanley Richard Lupino-Hook, 1893-1942), a “twinkly eyed handsome charmer with a shy smile” who was born in a hansom cab and lived as a child on Kennington Road.

The Lupinos hailed from a famous theatrical family that could trace its roots back to an Italian singer and puppet-master who came to London as a political refugee in the 17th century.

They were also related to the 18th-century actor Richard Estcourt, who founded the Beefsteak Club in the George and Vulture tavern in the City of London, which was the fictional headquarters of Dickens’ Pickwick Club. It was also the residence of Mr Pickwick until he retired to Dulwich.

One of Ida’s uncles was the comedian Barry Lupino, and a cousin was the actor Lupino Lane, star of the musical (and later film) Me and My Girl with its popular Cockney song and dance, The Lambeth Walk, based on the street of that name near the Imperial War Museum.

Ida’s Peckham-born mother was the actress Connie Emerald, sister of the actress and film producer Nell Emerald, one of whose silent films was Chester Forgets Himself (1924), which was based on a golfing story by Old Alleynian PG Wodehouse.

Nell also appeared in Fires of Innocence (1922), co-wrote This Week of Grace (1933, starring Gracie Fields) and was co-director of the Brightonia Film Company based in Brighton.

In 1911, before Ida’s parents were married, her mother Connie lived with her parents on Hayter Road, Brixton, and Stanley was a lodger at a boarding house on Denmark Road in Camberwell.

Ida’s parents met when they both appeared in a touring production of Go to Jericho and were married in Newcastle in 1915. They moved to Ardbeg Road in 1917.

Later, when they were both touring the USA, Ida (then aged eight) and her younger sister Rita (1921-2016), who also became an actress, were sent to Clarence House, a boarding school on Norman Road in Hove. A local Brighton and Hove bus, the 632, was later named in Ida’s honour.

While at school Ida wrote a play, Mademoiselle, and starred in the leading role as the French maid.

When her parents returned to London, the family were reunited and eventually settled in a large house on Leigham Court Road in Streatham in around 1930.

Her father constructed a 50-seater miniature theatre in the back garden, where the family put on plays for their friends, with the teenage Ida playing roles ranging from comedy to Shakespeare.

Ida then began appearing as an extra in various films produced at British International Pictures (later ABC) in Elstree, Hertfordshire, and even had a small part in The Love Race (1931), directed by and starring her father, whose cast also included her uncle, Wallace Lupino, and Lambeth-born Arty Ash.

In 1932 she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in London. Here she was taught by Alice Gachet, whose pupils had included Charles Laughton, one of whose films, Payment Deferred, was based on a novel set in south London that was written by Old Alleynian and East Dulwich resident CS Forester.

While at RADA, Ida played the part of Ellie Dunn in George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House, with the cast personally chosen by Shaw himself. Her performance was seen by the American director Allan Dwan – director of silent film classics such as Robin Hood (1922) starring Douglas Fairbanks – who gave her a big-screen break when he cast her (aged 14) as the lead in his black-and-white film, Her First Affaire (1932), made at Warner Bros’ First National British studios at Teddington, Middlesex.

Then came the motorcycle-racing film, Money for Speed (1933), edited by Croydon-born David Lean, followed by the smash hit I Lived with You (1933), starring her godfather Ivor Novello, who was a close friend of her father.

In the summer of 1933, after she was spotted by a talent scout for Hollywood’s Paramount Pictures, Ida signed a five-year contact with the studio and (along with her mother) moved to the USA.

Intended as the lead for Alice in Wonderland (1933) – starring WC Fields, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant – she later turned down the part and her first film was Search for Beauty (1934) starring the Olympic gold medal swimmer Buster Crabbe.

In 1936 she appeared with George Raft in Yours for the Asking, in which her mother also had a role (as did Groucho Marx, as an uncredited sunbather).

Later films included classics like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Light that Failed (both released in 1939) and two films starring Humphrey Bogart, They Drive By Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941), by which point Ida had been dubbed “Hollywood’s hottest star”.

The rest, as they say, is history. Ida became a naturalised US citizen in 1948 and the following year founded her own independent production company. As well as becoming a pioneering female Hollywood director, producer and screenwriter, she was the first woman to direct herself in a Hollywood movie (The Bigamist, 1953), the first woman to direct a film noir (The Hitch-Hiker, 1953) and the only woman to direct episodes of the iconic science fiction TV series The Twilight Zone (in which she also appeared).

In addition, she won a number of awards for her work, including the New York Film Critics Circle Award (Best Actress, The Hard Way, 1943) and has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles – one for her TV work and one for her films.

The last film she directed was The Trouble with Angels (1966), starring Rosalind Russell and Hayley Mills. However, she continued acting in films and television until the 1970s (she was Steve McQueen’s mother in Junior Bonner, 1972) and also directed a number of episodes for TV series.

Married and divorced three times, she had a daughter, Bridget, by her third husband, the actor Howard Duff. Ida died in Los Angeles on August 3, 1995.

Photo from the Everett Collection/Alamy

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