Ida Lupino was one of the first, true maverick female filmmakers of the 1950s. Lupino’s femme fatale drive to tell socially relevant stories, fueled her forty-eight-year career in Hollywood. Oddly enough, Lupino never saw herself as a feminist; she was simply doing her job as a filmmaker. She starred in some of the highest grossing films of the day before opening a production company of her very own, no small feat for the ’50s, where Hollywood was no less savage than it is now.

Lupino was born in London in 1918 into a family of performers dating back three hundred years,a family that King Edward the VII once famously referred to as “the royal family of greasepaint.”

Following in a dynasty laid out years before her birth, Ida attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts at thirteen, though she claimed to be fifteen in order to get an audition. Her first film was The Love Race (1931), though she’d play in three others before she caught the eye of Hollywood, and in 1933, at fourteen years of age, she signed with Paramount and sailed off to America with her mother in tow.

By age fifteen, with eight stunning film credits under her belt, Lupino set out on a life-long crusade to fight for the roles she felt she was capable of playing. After years of being cast as a prostitute or the film’s vamp, she rejected the role of a servant girl in Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934) and was subsequently put on suspension by Paramount. The suspension, of course, didn’t last, and in 1935, the studio finally gave her the “meatier” role she’d been craving in Peter Ibbetson. She shined as Agnes to Gary Cooper’s Ibbetson—just as she knew she would—and audiences and critics lauded her performance. 

Encouraged by this, she re-signed with Paramount, but the Paramount gods never gave her a lead role again and continued to underutilize her, casting her in B-movie bit parts—always as the seductress. It was bigwig Hollywood columnist Heda Hopper who advised Ida to change her looks, to reinvent herself from the Jean Harlow replica that Hollywood turned every young female actress of the day into. Lupino ditched the peroxide, grew out her dark Italian hair, and reinvented herself as a hard-edged everywoman, one who would eventually be referred to as “Hollywood’s last rugged individualist.” Following her transformation, she got married, left Paramount, and signed on with Warner Brothers instead.

With Warner Brothers, she was given top billing in the 1941 hit High Sierra, a film that shot both Lupino and Humphrey Bogart to fame. In 1942, when she continued to refuse roles as the temptress, the Hollywood rags dubbed her “Looney Lupi” and “difficult to work with,” and fairly soon she was being seen as “the poor man’s Bette Davis,” as it was said that she’d take roles that Davis would not. But, Lupino had other worries at the time, including the death of her father and the end of her marriage. 

During this time, it seemed as if Hollywood had no interest in female directors. Lupino herself stated that Hollywood’s primary purpose was to maintain an absolute, iron-clad system to exclude women. But, Lupino had always been one up for a challenge. In 1948, Lupino remarried and started her own film company, The Filmmakers Inc., with her new husband, writer/producer Collier Young. 

They had been brainstorming for years as business partners but fell in love, married, and dove right into filming together. The company’s first release, Not Wanted (1949), grossed over $1million despite the controversial storyline which featured an unwed mother dealing and an unwanted pregnancy. Ida originally titled the film “Unwed Mothers,” but that title was refused by the Breen Office, as it went against the newly instated “film code.” She made sure, however, that her original title made it on all the posters as the tagline. This would be the first film she co-produced, co-wrote, and directed. Though Lupino had taken over after the original director suffered a heart attack on the second day of filming, she took no credit for the job, but, in truth, this was the first film directed by a woman in almost a decade. 

Her first official directing credit came in 1951 for Never Fear, co-written and co-produced with Collier. Ida based this story on her own history with polio, an illness that she survived at the age of sixteen. While bedridden, Ida had composed a symphony, and four years later the piece wasperformed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She was a creative genius whose backlog of creativity would carry her through her forty-eight-year career as a writer, producer, and actress. 

While the McCarthy trials of postwar conservative America were taking place in Hollywood, Howard Hughes of RKO, signed a three-film agreement with The Filmmakers Inc., giving them total control of their own content. Lupino was probably the first director to use product placement at this time, doing it before the term even existed just to stay within budget. Ida was a master at saving money on set; she renegade filmed in public places, re-used old sets, and with her scrappy attitude and grit, always got her films in on time and under budget.

Her next release under RKO, Outrage (1950), focused on the topic of rape, a bold and contentious move in history let alone in film. At the time, the word rape itself was completely taboo, with “criminal assault” being the politically correct vernacular. 

Despite their divorce in 1952, Collier and Lupino would continue to make films together throughout the ’50s, and in 1953, Lupino became the first woman to write, produce, and direct in the film noir genre. 

The Hitch-Hiker (1953) was based on the real-life case of William Cook who murdered six people while hitchhiking across the United States. Another fact that set the film apart from others in the genre was that it featured no female characters at all. Watching men being held at gunpoint—rather than the usual damsel-in-distress—made the suspense and vulnerability within the picture that much more terrifying. The deteriorating transformation of the two men being held captive was very physical and, even more so, emotional. Lupino’s documentarian style of filming worked perfectly to highlight the stark differences between the close quarters of the car where the film was shot and the vast expanse of the desert, putting her maverick skills and precise vision to good work.

Throughout her career, Lupino worked diligently to push the envelope, fighting against the status quo in Hollywood to bring forth issues that other filmmakers shied away from, as with Not Wanted and Outrage. In 1951, she fearlessly featured the nitty-gritty life of a young tennis star, exploited by the system in Hard, Fast and Beautiful. Her next major film, The Bigamist (1953),was another hard hitter, helping Lupino set yet another record in Hollywood history, as the first woman to direct and star in the same film. The film was produced and written by her ex-husband Collier and starred his new wife, Joan Fontaine as the bigamist’s “other woman.”

Finishing her three-film contract with RKO, Lupino performed television acting jobs only to support her film company. From 1953 to 1956 she starred in the television series Four Star Playhouse and ran in two seasons with her third husband, Howard Duff, in Mr. Adams and Eve. Unfortunately, despite her ongoing acting jobs to keep the film company afloat, The Filmmakers Inc. shut down in 1955, with twelve films to their name, six of which Lupino directed or co-directed.  

Despite her mother’s death in 1959 and the intense depression that followed, she continued to be a prolific director in the land of television, directing and starring in hundreds of big-name television shows such as Gilligan’s Island (1964), The Untouchables (1959), Bonanza (1959), and Big Valley (1965). Lupino set two final records during her time in Hollywood; she was not only the first woman to ever direct an episode of The Twilight Zone, but she was the first director in the show’s history to both direct and star in an episode as well. 

In 1966, she directed her final film, The Trouble With Angels and by the mid-80s, after addiction and her third failed marriage, Ida had become rather reclusive, saying, “There is a little black devil inside me. Sometimes I must fight that devil. It’s a terrible fight. Someday I’m going to lose.” 

At sixty-six, as she struggled with depression, a home and relationship with her only childin shambles, and alcoholism, Lupino signed herself into a conservatorship with her assistant, Mary Ann Anderson. With Anderson’s help, Ida sobered up and got her finances back on track. Following her death in 1995, Anderson posthumously published Ida’s memoirs, Behind the Camera, forever immortalizing a woman known as a trailblazer, a woman who set records and shattered the glass everywhere she went. 

Whenever you hear female actors, directors, or filmmakers praising and honoring the “women who came before them,” know they are speaking of Ida Lupino, truly one of the hardest working women in showbusiness. Lupino battled until the end of her days for her hard won right to create her own ideas in her own words, through her own vision. Without her dedication and desire to fight for her own seat at the table, the industry certainly would not be what it is today.