Yesterday, while going through newspaper archives, I ran across a great photo of Ida Lupino dancing with Lt. William MacIlwinen in early 1945.
Who is MacIlwinen, or—as the newspaper caption erroneously spells it—"Macwillinen"?
MacIlwinen is the fellow that Miss Lupino teamed with in early 1946, roughly a year after this photo was published, to write the score for her musical adaptation of her deceased father's stage comedy Apple Tree Farm. For the dozen-plus songs they wrote for this show, MacIlwinen wrote the tunes while Ida contributed the lyrics.
Long-time readers may remember my "discovery", back in May, that Apple Tree Farm had not gone unproduced—as I had assumed based on other readings. In fact, it had been produced in 1949 at the University of North Carolina.
If you don't remember or aren't a long-time reader, please be sure to go back and read about it here: "Ida Lupino's Apple Tree Farm". I think it is quite a story!
For Ida Lupino, music and songwriting were, for many years, one of her primary interests outside of her career in films. So, of course, she had other musical collaborators besides Lt. MacIlwinen. But I do believe she only had one musical comedy stage show produced. And so MacIlwinen should hold special prominence in accounts of Miss Lupino's musical accomplishments, and finding photographs of the two of them together is a special occasion.
The photo caption says, by the way:
LEARNING 'LESSON' — The three R's now include "rhumba" when Ida Lupino dances with Lt. William Macwillinen, a former North Carolina school teacher. Lt. Macwillinen also is a songwriter and Ida helps him with his work, when he needs her assistance.
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