Ida Lupino

Ida LUPINO (1918-1995, United Kingdom) was born into a theatre family in London. From a young age, she was encouraged to perform. Though she wanted to become a writer, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where she acted in some films. In 1931, she made her first film appearance in The Love Race. She had worked as an actress in Hollywood since the 1930s and continued to play a range of leading roles. After her breakthrough in The Light That Failed (1939), she began to be taken seriously as an actress, resulting in improved roles during the 1940s, such as in They Drive by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941), starring among some of the biggest leading men George Raft and Humphrey Bogart. She was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress in The Hard Way (1943). A year after leaving Warner Bros. in 1947, she set up the independent production house The Filmmakers Inc. with her then-husband Collier Young, an American film producer and screenwriter. In 1949 their first film Not Wanted was released. With her film The Hitch-hiker (1953), Lupino became the first woman to direct a film noir. The Filmmakers produced 12 feature films in total, six of which Lupino directed or co-directed before the company ceased operations in 1955. She began directing for television, making episodes for over 30 US TV series such as The Untouchables (1959-1963), Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1963-1965), and Bewitched (1964-1972). For The Twilight Zone series, she was the only woman to have directed an episode, "The Masks" (1964) and both directed and starred in another episode, "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" (1959).