Lauren Bacall

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in the Bronx, New York City, the only child of Natalie Weinstein-Bacal and William Perske ^[1]. Both sides of the family were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; her mother's people came from Romania and her father's from Poland. Her parents divorced when Betty was five, and her father largely disappeared from her life afterward. She was raised by her mother, who took the surname Bacal, and by a close circle of uncles and grandparents who helped support the household ^[2].

Money was tight, but relatives paid for her education at private schools, including Highland Manor boarding school in Tarrytown and later Julia Richman High School in Manhattan ^[1]. As a teenager she was stagestruck. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where a classmate was Kirk Douglas, though she could not afford to continue past her first year because the school did not then offer scholarships to women ^[2].

To pay her way she worked as a theater usher and as a fashion model in New York's garment district. Modeling turned out to be the hinge of her life. In 1943 she appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, photographed by Louise Dahl-Wolfe, an image that caught the attention of Slim Hawks, wife of the film director Howard Hawks ^[3]. Slim showed the cover to her husband, and within weeks the eighteen year old was on a train to Los Angeles for a screen test.

Howard Hawks signed the young model to a personal contract, changed her first name to Lauren, and set about manufacturing a screen persona: insolent, unhurried, and older than her years ^[3]. Bacall added the second L to her mother's surname. Hawks cast her opposite Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944), an adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel, and her debut became one of the most famous first appearances in American film ^[1].

During the shoot she was so nervous that she pressed her chin down and looked upward to steady her trembling head, a posture the press soon called The Look ^[2]. Her delivery of the line inviting Bogart to whistle, written by Jules Furthman, entered movie lore. Warner Bros. publicity leaned hard on the new star, and audiences responded. Any honest Lauren Bacall biography has to note how unusual this was: a nineteen year old with no film experience holding the screen against one of the biggest stars of the era.

Off camera, Bogart and Bacall fell in love during production, despite a twenty five year age difference and his troubled third marriage ^[4]. They married in May 1945 at the Ohio farm of the writer Louis Bromfield. On screen the partnership continued through three more films: The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), a run that fixed both actors permanently in the iconography of film noir ^[1].

Bacall's career after the Bogart films showed range that the noir image sometimes obscured. She held her own in the comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) alongside Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and she took dramatic parts in Young Man with a Horn (1950), Written on the Wind (1956), and Designing Woman (1957) ^[1]. She fought Warner Bros. repeatedly over weak scripts, accepting suspensions rather than roles she thought beneath her, an unusually combative stance for a contract player of that period ^[2].

Her second act came on Broadway. After success in the comedy Cactus Flower in 1965, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for Applause in 1970, a musical version of All About Eve in which she played Margo Channing ^[5]. She won a second Tony in 1981 for Woman of the Year. Critics who had once treated her as Bogart's discovery now wrote about her as a stage star in her own right.

Recognition kept arriving late in life, which is a recurring pattern among Lauren Bacall achievements. Her 1978 autobiography, Lauren Bacall by Myself, was a bestseller and won the National Book Award ^[6]. At seventy two she earned her first Academy Award nomination, as Best Supporting Actress for The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), and won the Golden Globe for the same role ^[1]. In 2009 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her an honorary Academy Award in recognition of her central place in the golden age of motion pictures ^[7]. The Kennedy Center honored her in 1997.

The Bogart marriage lasted until his death and produced two children: a son, Stephen, born in 1949, and a daughter, Leslie, born in 1952 ^[4]. The couple's Holmby Hills house became the informal headquarters of the drinking and social circle that Bacall herself dubbed the Rat Pack, years before the name attached to Frank Sinatra's group ^[2]. She largely scaled back her film work in the early 1950s to raise the children and to accompany Bogart on location.

Both were politically active. In 1947 Bogart and Bacall joined the Committee for the First Amendment and flew to Washington to protest the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings into alleged communism in Hollywood, one of the most visible celebrity protests of the blacklist era ^[2]. She remained a lifelong liberal Democrat and campaigned for Adlai Stevenson and later Democratic candidates.

Bogart was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1956 and died in January 1957 at fifty seven, leaving Bacall a widow at thirty two ^[4]. After a brief and unhappy engagement to Sinatra, she married the actor Jason Robards in 1961. The marriage produced a son, the actor Sam Robards, but foundered on Robards's drinking, and they divorced in 1969 ^[1]. She never married again, and in interviews she was blunt about refusing to spend her life as a professional widow, insisting on being judged by her own work rather than by the men she had married ^[6].

From the 1960s onward Bacall based herself in New York, living for decades in the Dakota apartment building on Central Park West ^[8]. She alternated stage work with character parts in films such as Murder on the Orient Express (1974), where she joined an ensemble cast in the Agatha Christie adaptation, and The Shootist (1976), John Wayne's final picture, in which she played the widow who takes in his dying gunfighter ^[1].

She kept working well past the age when most stars of her generation had retired. Later credits included Misery (1990), Robert Altman's Prêt-à-Porter (1994), Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003) and Manderlay (2005), and voice work as the Witch of the Waste in Hayao Miyazaki's English language version of Howl's Moving Castle ^[1]. A second volume of memoirs, Now, appeared in 1994, and a third, By Myself and Then Some, updated the first book in 2005 ^[6].

Bacall died on August 12, 2014, at her home in New York City after a stroke, five weeks short of her ninetieth birthday ^[8]. Obituaries around the world treated her death as the closing of an era, since she was among the last surviving leads of the Hollywood studio system's classic period.

Among the basic Lauren Bacall facts, the numbers alone are striking: a film career of more than sixty years, two Tony Awards, a National Book Award, a Golden Globe, an honorary Oscar, and a Kennedy Center Honor ^[7]. In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked her twentieth on its list of the greatest female stars of classic American cinema ^[9]. Her four films with Bogart, especially To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, remain fixtures of film noir study and repertory programming.

Her influence runs deeper than the filmography. The husky voice, the level stare, and the refusal to play the ingenue gave later generations a model of screen femininity built on wit and self possession rather than vulnerability. Writers on film often cite her as the sharpest example of the Hawksian woman, the fast talking equal that Howard Hawks liked to set against his heroes ^[3]. Her memoir is still read as one of the most candid star autobiographies, valued for its unsentimental account of studio Hollywood, of Bogart's illness, and of a woman rebuilding a career twice over ^[6].

Bacall herself resisted nostalgia. She kept accepting new work into her eighties, argued with directors, and told interviewers that legends were for the dead. That stubbornness, as much as the famous whistle line, explains why her name still carries weight a decade after her death ^[8].