Ida Lupino (Actor)

"'My father once said to me, 'You're born to be bad,' she recalled. 'And it was true. I made eight films in England before I came to America, and I played a tramp or a slut in all of them.'" --From TThe Hollywood Reporter, August 7, 1995.

"Although she won a best actress award from the New York Film Critics in 1943 for her role as a domineering sister in The Hard Way", she came to view her Hollywood acting career a failure and once referred to herself as 'the poor man's Bette Davis.'" --From The Hollywood Reporter, August 7, 1995.

"Her films [as a director] display the obsessions and consistencies of a true auteur. ... What is most interesting about her films are not her stories of unwed motherhood or the tribulation of career women, but the way in which she uses male actors: particulary in "The Bigamist" and "The Hitchhiker" (both 1953), Lupino was able to reduce the male to the same sort of dangerous, irrational force that women represented in most male-directed examples of Hollywood film noir." --Richard Koszarski in "Hollywood Directors 1914-40" (Oxford University Press, 1976)

"She regarded her own directorial career as an unconventional choice for a woman, and had remarked in an interview that she'd rather be cooking her man's dinner. However, the content and technical virtuosity of her work belie this statement and point to a very wily director who knows the uses of conventionality as a tool." --Barbara Scharres in The Film Center Gazette (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, February 1987).

Lupino's birth year is open to question: other dates given are 1914, 1916 and 1919.