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The Resurrection of Ida Lupino
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17458 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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3 / 1998 |
2,651 Words |
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Susan Fegley Osmond
Susan Fegley Osmond is an editor in the Arts section of The
World & I. |
What comes to your mind when I say Ida Lupino? It might be a black-and-white image of a 1940s screen actress whose knowing, no-nonsense gaze penetrates all around her with searching intelligence and smoldering or suddenly searing passion. Although she is most remembered for playing gutsy dames whose hardened world-weariness often shielded a tender heart, the petite brunette was much more than this. Lupino was America's most prolific woman director of films and television, a screenwriter and occasional film producer, a composer whose music was performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and an actress whose career (in theater, film, radio, and TV) spanned nearly fifty years.
Since her death in 1995, Lupino has become the focus of growing--if belated--appreciation. In 1995 an anthology of eight essays, Queen of the 'B's: Ida Lupino Behind the Camera, was published by Praeger Publishers of the Greenwood Publishing Group. In 1996 the informative and insightful Ida Lupino: A Biography, by William Donati, was published by the University Press of Kentucky. Her work has been the subject of retrospectives in film festivals, in special screenings, and on Turner Movie Classics cable network. Finally, last fall Kino on Video released three films Lupino directed under her own independent production company: Not Wanted (1949), The Bigamist (1953), and the movie Lupino felt was her best cinematic directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker (1953). All this leads us to look beyond the image of what Lupino herself wryly called "the poor man's Bette Davis."
Lupino was born in London on February 4, 1918, the twelfth generation of an unbroken line of entertainers that stretched back to the early seventeenth century. Ida's father, Stanley Lupino, was one of Britain's
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