Lupino Lane

Lupino Lane, born Henry William George Lupino on 16 June 1892 in Hackney, London, was an English actor, theatre manager, and member of the prominent theatrical Lupino family. His father was Harry Charles Lupino (1867–1925), part of the Hook family who adopted the Lupino surname. His great-aunt Sarah Lane (1822–1899), director of the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, persuaded the young Henry to take the Lane name so it would not disappear. His brothers Wallace Lupino and Stanley Lupino were also actors, as was his nephew Richard Lupino, the son of Wallace. His cousin was the screenwriter, director, and actress Ida Lupino. Lane died on 10 November 1959.

Lane began performing as a child, billed as "Little Nipper," and made his first stage appearance at age four in a benefit performance in Birmingham for Vesta Tilley. His London debut followed in 1903 at the London Pavilion, where he appeared as Nipper Lane. The nickname endured, and throughout his life friends and family called him Nip. By 1915 he was performing at the Empire Theatre, and that same year his silent film career began with a series of British short films, including the experimental Mr. Butterbuns series. On 10 February 1917 he married actress Violet Blythe, with whom he had a son, the actor Lauri Lupino Lane (1921–1986).

Lane's Broadway career spanned 1920 to 1925. He and his wife Violet Blythe both appeared in the musical Afgar at the Central Theatre during the 1920–21 season. He subsequently appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1924 at the New Amsterdam Theatre, a run that extended from June 1924 through March 1925. His final Broadway credit during this period was playing Ko-Ko in The Mikado in 1925, a role that earned him strong reviews and which he later named, in a 1929 interview, as his personal favorite. During a 1921 pantomime production of Aladdin at the Hippodrome, Lane demonstrated his extraordinary physical abilities by diving through sixty-three stage traps in six minutes.

Lane was especially suited to physical comedy because he was double-jointed, and his body was capable of remarkable acrobatic feats. One signature move involved him reclining or sitting on the floor and then suddenly thrusting his legs forward to leap upright, a stunt visible in his 1927 short Hello Sailor. After appearing in several shorts and features for Fox in 1922–23, he played Rudolph in D. W. Griffith's 1924 feature Isn't Life Wonderful? In 1925, Earle Hammons of Educational Pictures signed Lane after producer Jack White saw him performing in The Mikado on Broadway. Lane went on to appear in approximately forty Hollywood films during the 1920s, with his brother Wallace Lupino frequently serving as his co-star. Directors including Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Lamont, Norman Taurog, and Mark Sandrich worked with Lane, though by 1928 he insisted on directing his own films, taking screen credit under the name Henry W. George, his given names. In one 1929 film, Only Me, he played twenty-seven distinct characters.

During his first year at Educational, Lane also produced and starred in The Hollywood Music Box Revue, which ran for nineteen weeks. Several young women featured in the production later had screen careers, among them Lupe Vélez, Nancy Carroll, and Marion Byron. Lane made the transition to sound film with a light British-accented tenor voice and was among the first Educational stars to make talking two-reel comedies. He played a significant role in the 1929 musical film The Love Parade and made a guest appearance in the Warner Bros. revue The Show of Shows. His final Warner feature was Golden Dawn (1930), in which he appeared in a supporting capacity. A Vitaphone short titled Evolution of the Dance, released in February 1930 as a two-reel Technicolor production, served as his American swan song; the short had originally been filmed as a production number for The Show of Shows but was cut from that film and released separately without crediting Lane, who had already left the country.

Returning to England, Lane worked exclusively in Europe throughout the 1930s. He co-produced Twenty to One with Sir Oswald Stoll, a musical written by L. Arthur Rose and Frank Eyton with music by Billy Mayerl, which opened on the West End in November 1935 and ran for a year before embarking on an extended British tour. The production marked Lane's first appearance as Bill Snibson, a racetrack tout who became one of his most celebrated roles. The follow-up production, Me and My Girl, written by Rose and Douglas Furber with music by Noel Gay, proved an even greater success. In it, Snibson inherits a country estate and brings his friends from Lambeth to stay with him. The show featured the song-and-dance routine "The Lambeth Walk," which Lane performed and which spread in popularity across Europe in the late 1930s. Lane directed and produced the show in addition to starring in it. In the United Kingdom, his portrayal of Bill Snibson in Me and My Girl and his association with "The Lambeth Walk" remain the defining achievements of his career.