Ida Lupino was a trail-blazer.

Not only was she one of the most vibrant Hollywood actresses of the 1940s and 1950s, starring in such film classics as They Drive by Night, High Sierra, The Sea Wolf, Ladies in Retirement, Road House, Lust for Gold, and The Big Knife, but she was also only the second woman to become a member of the Director's Guild.

As an independent writer-producer-director, her bold films dealt with subjects that the major Hollywood studios were afraid to tackle: out-of-wedlock mothers, polio, and rape. Her 1953 directorial effort, The Hitch-Hiker, is a benchmark of the film noir genre.

Ida's personal life was not easy. The daughter of a British theatrical family that stretched back generations, she moved to Hollywood while still in her teens, languishing in mediocre films until she garnered the role of a mad woman of the streets in director William Wellman's The Light That Failed. She was also married three times: to actor Louis Hayward, producer Collier Young, and to actor Howard Duff, the longest and certainly the stormiest union of them all.

Michael B. Druxman's one-woman play, Ida: The Last Lupino, joins Ida in 1983 when she is living alone in her decaying Brentwood home as a virtual hermit, lamenting the break-up of her marriage with Duff. Ida: The Last Lupino is a vivid, often witty, portrait of a woman who conquered a man's world.