Noir Nook: International Femmes
Film noir movies may be, generally speaking, set in urban American cities, but many of its inhabitants hail from the other side of the world. This month’s Noir Nook takes a look at the lives and careers of three noir dames who bring a bit of international flair to the shadowy proceedings of noir.
A star on the silver screen and a pioneering director behind the camera, Ida Lupino was a native of London, born on February 4th (most sources agree that her birth year was 1918, but a few say she was born as early as 1914). She had quite the entertainment pedigree; her father was a dance hall performer, her mother was once touted as the fastest tap dancer alive, her paternal great-grandfather was a singer and acrobatic ballet dancer, her great uncles were stage headliners, and her cousin was popular comedy actor Lupino Lane. Ida joined their ranks at an early age – her grandfather taught her to sing, compose music, and recite Shakespeare, and when she was seven, she wrote, produced, and starred in her first school play. A few years later, she made her professional stage debut at London’s Tom Thumb Theatre, where she enacted segments from the latest musical comedies.
At the age of 13, Lupino enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and she got her first big break when she was featured as the ingenue in Her First Affaire (1932), helmed by American director Allan Dwan. Interestingly, Ida’s mother had originally tested for the part, but she was accompanied to the test by her daughter and Dwan wanted Ida instead. “I said, ‘What about her – can she act?’” Dwan recalled years later. “’She was Ida Lupino. And she was great.’” After appearances in several more movies, Ida attracted the attention of Hollywood and she made her American film debut in a pre-Code romantic comedy called Search for Beauty (1934).
In the 1940s and 1950s, Ida would star in nearly 10 noirs (or noir-adjacent features), including a period noir, Ladies in Retirement (1941), with her then-husband Louis Hayward, and a western noir, Lust for Gold (1949), starring Glenn Ford. Some of her other noirs are among my personal favorites from the era – Road House (1948) and Private Hell 36 (1954); in both, she deftly playing a hard-boiled nightclub singer.
Nina Consuelo Maud Fock was born in Leyden, Holland, on April 20, 1924; her parents were Dutch symphony conductor and composer Dirk Fock, and American silent screen actress Consuelo Flowerton, who served as the famous “Poster Girl” during World War I. When Nina was two, her parents divorced, and she moved to New York with her mother. In her teens, after an extensive education in the arts, she thought she’d become either a painter or a pianist: “I was a failure in both professions at the age of 16,” she later said, “so I decided to try acting.”
Although she enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, Nina found that landing her first acting job was easier said than done. Each time she applied for a part, she was turned down because she had no experience. But one day, she got wise, finally telling a producer that she’d had a featured role in a production called Life Is Like That. “It was a big lie. I made up the name on the spot,” she said. The producer believed her and gave Nina her first job, in summer stock. The following year (after changing the ‘k’ in her last name to an ‘h’ – “For obvious reasons,” she said), she made her big screen debut in The Return of the Vampire (1943), starring Bela Lugosi.
Nina’s noir output encompassed four first-rate features opposite such stars as Dick Powell, William Holden, and Glenn Ford; she was shown to her best advantage in My Name is Julia Ross (1945), where she starred in the title role of a secretary who is kidnapped by a wealthy matron and her psychopathic son.
Signe Hasso
Of the three dames featured in this month’s Nook, Signe Hasso may be the least recognizable to most readers – but she deserves an introduction. A native of Stockholm, Sweden, she was born Signe Eleonora Cecilia Larsson on August 15, 1915, the eldest of three children. Her businessman father died when she was four, leaving the family destitute. For a time, the family made ends meet by taking in boarders, but they were later forced to move to a six-floor walk-up in a housing project. “One room for five people,” Signe recalled. “Four families shared an outside toilet. We were so poor you couldn’t believe it.”
When Signe was 12, her luck changed. A classmate appearing in a production of the Royal Dramatic Theater became ill and suggested that the company look for a replacement in the Larsson household. Signe – who had her sights set on becoming a doctor – wasn’t interested, but her mother flipped a coin and Signe was selected to go. “I threw myself on the rug,” Signe said, “and drummed my heels and screamed that my sister should be in the play, not I.” She only relented when her mother gave her an orange. “We never had treats like that. So I went to the theater – with the orange in my pocket.” Signe was an overnight hit, and after appearing in numerous productions over the next several years, she debuted on the big screen in the 1933 feature Tystnadens Hus. She would go on to marry theater director Harry Hasso, keeping his last name after their 1940 divorce. (Her name, incidentally, was pronounced SEEN-yah HAH-so, but she once joked, “You can pronounce it any old way – it means ‘Bless you’ in Swedish.”) The same year of her divorce, Signe signed a contract with RKO, but after two years without a film, she moved on to MGM. Her first American film was Journey for Margaret (1942), starring Robert Young and Margaret O’Brien.
Signe’s introduction to film noir came in The House on 92nd Street (1945), a based-on-a-true-story feature where she starred as a Nazi spy. Her other noirs were Johnny Angel (1945), opposite George Raft; Strange Triangle (1946), where she was a standout as an unemotional femme fatale; and one of her best-known films, A Double Life (1947), starring Ronald Colman.
Got a hankering for some fine noir performances? You can’t go wrong with the films featuring this trio of international femmes. Treat yourself!
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– Karen Burroughs Hannsberry for Classic Movie Hub
You can read all of Karen’s Noir Nook articles here.
Karen Burroughs Hannsberry is the author of the Shadows and Satin blog, which focuses on movies and performers from the film noir and pre-Code eras, and the editor-in-chief of The Dark Pages, a bimonthly newsletter devoted to all things film noir. Karen is also the author of two books on film noir – Femme Noir: The Bad Girls of Film and Bad Boys: The Actors of Film Noir. You can follow Karen on Twitter at @TheDarkPages.
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