IDA LUPINO? Thanks for the Tip, Giovanni Guidi et al (and ECM)
IDA LUPINO?!? Who knew? I'm truly embarrassed to say, not me. (My vast ignorance runs both broad and deep). Talk about an extraordinary woman, so ahead of her time that OUR time has yet to catch up.
"Ida Lupino" is the title of a new and pretty tremendous modern jazz album by Giovanni Guidi, Gianluca Petrella, Louis Sclavis & Gerald Cleaver on ECM. I knew Lupino was a Hollywood star, had been dubbed "the English Jean Harlow," and starred with Bogart in High Sierra. Her's was one of those name-only people from old Hollywood to me. That was it.
I wondered why she popped up as an album title (actually, I still don't know - maybe she's a hero, make that heroine, no, hero, of theirs or something, deservedly so if so). So I just Wikipedia'd her. I love/hate it when I discover things I shoulda known.
She was abso-fucking-lutely amazing. This opening paragraph only scratches the surface - and keep in mind, Lupino's career began in the 1930s, three generations before Sophia Coppola and "Lost In Translation," in the old super-male dominated, hyper-chauvinistic Hollywood (and American society in general):
"Ida Lupino (4 February 1918 – 3 August 1995) was an Anglo-American actress and singer who became a pioneering director and producer—the only woman working within the 1950s Hollywood studio system to do so. With her independent production company, she co-wrote and co-produced several of her own social-message films, and was the first woman to direct a film noir, The Hitch-Hiker, in 1953. In her 48-year career, she appeared in 59 films and directed eight others, mostly in the United States, where she became a citizen in 1948. The majority of her later career as an actress, writer, and director was in television, where she directed more than 100 episodes of productions ranging across Westerns, supernatural tales, situation comedies, murder mysteries, and gangster stories. She was the only woman to direct episodes of the original The Twilight Zone series, and the only director to have starred in the series, as well."
If you don't already know all about her, your jaw will have dropped to your knees by the time you finish the entire entry. Mine's still on the floor. Wiki her now and thank me later.
