Lupino Lane

In America he is remembered as an acrobatic star of silent comedy shorts produced between 1925 and 1929. Lane was especially well suited to physical comedy because he was double-jointed, and his limber frame was capable of performing dazzling acrobatics. One of his unique feats had him sitting or reclining on the floor, and suddenly thrusting his legs forward and leaping to his feet (as seen in his 1927 short Hello Sailor). Lane married actress Violet Blythe on 10 February 1917, and their son was the actor Lauri Lupino Lane (1921–1986). Lane's brothers were the actors Wallace Lupino and Stanley Lupino, and his nephew (Wallace's son) was another actor, Richard Lupino.

Lane was born in Hackney, London, son of Harry Charles Lupino (1867–1925), part of the Hook family who adopted the surname 'Lupino.' His great-aunt Sarah Lane (1822–1899, née Borrow), the director of the Britannia Theatre in Hoxton, did not want her name to die out and prevailed upon young Henry to take the Lane name. Lane made his first stage appearance at the age of four in a benefit in Birmingham for Vesta Tilley. He made his London début in 1903 as Nipper Lane at the London Pavilion. The Nipper name stuck, and for the rest of his life his friends and family addressed him as Nip. In 1915, he appeared at the Empire Theatre and played comic roles in theatre and film on both sides of the Atlantic from then on. In 1921, he dived through sixty three stage traps in six minutes while performing in a 1921 pantomime production of Aladdin at the Hippodrome. Lane and his wife Violet Blythe were both in the Broadway production of the musical Afgar, at the Central Theatre, in 1920–21, and he appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1924 at the New Amsterdam Theatre, from June 1924 to March 1925, and subsequently played Ko-Ko in The Mikado on Broadway in 1925, receiving good reviews. In 1929 Lane told a reporter that Ko-Ko was his favorite role. Lane's silent film career started in 1915, at age 23, in a series of British short films, including the experimental Mr Butterbuns series. As a comedian, he appeared in 40 Hollywood films made in the 1920s. After several shorts and features for Fox in 1922–23, Lane appeared as Rudolph in D. W. Griffith's 1924 feature Isn't Life Wonderful?

Earle Hammons of silent-comedy studio Educational Pictures signed Lupino Lane in 1925. Hammons sent his chief producer Jack White to see Lane on stage: "He was working in New York in The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan. I went backstage to see him after the show was over and we got to know each other fairly well," recalled White. Lane starred in a series of short comedies that featured his acrobatic flips and falls. Lane's co-star was usually his brother, Wallace Lupino. Wallace also starred in his own comedies, only three of which are known to survive. (Archivist Ben Model discovered one of them and posted it on YouTube.) During his first year at Educational, Lane found time to produce and star in The Hollywood Music Box Revue, which enjoyed an unusually long run (by local standards) of 19 weeks. Some of the young ladies featured in the show went on to screen careers, including Lupe Vélez, Nancy Carroll, and Marion Byron. Roscoe Arbuckle, Charles Lamont, Norman Taurog, and Mark Sandrich were some of Lupino Lane's directors, but in 1928 Lane insisted on directing the films himself. (He received screen credit under the pseudonym "Henry W. George," his given names.) White commented, "[Wallace Lupino] was approachable where Lupino Lane was not. Lane was a very difficult guy to make a movie with, because he disagreed with everything except what came from his head. I thought he was rather arrogant. He went on for a couple years, though [sic]." Lane demonstrated that he knew his business, and his comedies successfully displayed his agility and versatility: in one film he played 27 characters (Only Me, 1929). Lupino Lane made the transition to talking pictures, his voice being a light, British-accented tenor. He was one of the first of Educational's stars to make talking two-reel comedies; his sound shorts alternated with silent shorts through the end of 1929.

In the 1930s Lane worked exclusively in Europe, starring in feature films and on the musical-comedy stage. With Sir Oswald Stoll, Lane co-produced Twenty to One, written by L. Arthur Rose and Frank Eyton with music by Billy Mayerl, on the West End. Lane made his first appearance as Bill Snibson in this production, in which Snibson, a racetrack tout, was a big hit. The production ran for a year starting from November 1935 and went on a long British tour afterward. Me and My Girl, the follow-up show, written by Rose and Douglas Furber with music by Noel Gay, was an even bigger hit. Snibson inherits a country estate and invites his mates from Lambeth to stay with him. It featured a hit song and dance routine from Lane called "The Lambeth Walk", which became popular throughout Europe in the late 1930s. Lane directed and produced the show as well as starring in it for 1,550 performances between 1937 and 1940. It was the first British musical comedy to be televised. A film version went into production in October 1938. The Me and My Girl film was released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in January 1940 under the title The Lambeth Walk, purely on the popularity of the dance craze. Trade reviewer Pete Harrison cautioned exhibitors that the film was "not for the American masses; the accents are thick, and some of the situations and slang expressions are so British that they will be completely lost on American audiences." Harrison's prediction proved correct: in some American theaters, moviegoers walked out on the picture.

Me and My Girl was a vehicle for Lupino Lane, and it made him a rich man. Lane continued to act on stage and on television in England for the rest of his life. In 1946, after it sustained damage during World War II, he purchased the shell of the Gaiety Theatre in London to rescue it from dereliction, intending to produce comedies. He failed to win the financial backing to refurbish it and sold it in 1950. The theatre was demolished in 1956. On March 25, 1956 Lupino Lane was the subject of This Is Your Life when he was surprised by host Eamonn Andrews at London's BBC Television Theatre. Columnist Bernard Charman reported, "The interesting point came when Eamonn Andrews was reminding him of how Me and My Girl was transformed from a failure to a blazing success. The musical was in fact on the very point of folding when John Watt and Charles Brewer did a live radio broadcast of it from the theatre. From that day it never looked back -- and ran for five years." Lane also appeared on radio's Desert Island Discs in 1957. The premise of the show had the guest performer "cast away" with a phonograph on a desert island, and selecting eight favorite records he would take with him.

On December 26, 2012, Alpha Video released Lupino Lane Silent Comedy Collection, Volume 1 on Region 0 DVD-R. On January 28, 2014, Alpha released Lupino Lane Silent Comedy Collection, Volume 2. On November 15, 2022, D&D Productions (Dave Glass and Dave Wyatt) released Lupino Lane: Silent Comedian on DVD & Blu-ray.