Lauren Bacall, the sultry actress with the husky voice who captured Humphrey Bogart’s heart both on and off the movie screen, has died at the age of 89.
Bacall suffered a massive stroke at her New York home on Tuesday morning (local time), a family member said.
“With deep sorrow, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall,” the Bogart Estate said on Twitter.
Bacall was married to Bogart from 1945 until his death in 1957.
They appeared together in several films, including The Big Sleep (1946) and Key Largo (1948).
She was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in New York City, the only child of immigrant parents.
After her parents’ divorce, she adopted a variation of her mother’s maiden name, Bacal.
The public knew her as Lauren, the screen name hung on her by director Howard Hawks, while friends called her Betty.
Bogart simply called her “Baby”, in a love story that ended prematurely with his death from throat cancer at the age of 57.
Bacall had set out to be a Broadway star. She played small roles on stage and modelled for Harper’s Bazaar magazine, which published a photograph of her that was spotted by Hawks’ wife.
Bacall was only 19 when Hawks cast her in her first movie, 1944’s To Have and Have Not, as an American girl who shows up at a seedy hotel in Martinique.
She won a place in Hollywood history when she purred to Bogart, “You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips together – and blow.”
They wed the next year after he ended his turbulent third marriage to actress Mayo Methot.
Bacall and Bogart went on to star together in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948).
Bacall starred in more than 30 other films including How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck.
A comic turn in How to Marry a Millionaire earned applause but few of her other films were memorable and she became the self-proclaimed “den mother” to her two children, Stephen, and Leslie and a regular crowd of Bogart’s drinking buddies.
Much of Bacall’s allure came from what was known as “the look,” a sexy but soft glance.
She explained it by saying: “I used to tremble from nerves so badly that the only way I could hold my head steady was to lower my chin practically to my chest and look up at Bogie. That was the beginning of ‘the look’.”
After Bogart’s death, Bacall had a well-publicised affair with Frank Sinatra and a stormy eight-year marriage to actor Jason Robards that produced a son, Sam, who would become an actor.
Bacall worked occasionally in films in the 1960s and 1970s, notably in Harper (1966) opposite Paul Newman, the all-star Agatha Christie hit Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and The Shootist (1976), which was John Wayne’s last film.
Her career revived in fits and starts through the 1980s and 1990s, culminating in her first Oscar nomination for her supporting role as Barbra Streisand’s domineering mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).
Bacall won the Golden Globe and several other honours for the role, but the Oscar continued to elude her.
After her film career cooled, Bacall returned to the stage.
She won best actress at the Tony Awards for Applause (197) and Woman of the Year (1981).
Over the years she had transformed her persona from a willowy temptress with a come-hither look to a shrewd and worldly woman.
Of her career and life, Bacall once said: “I travelled by roller coaster, a roller coaster on which the highs were as high as anyone could ever hope to go.
“And the lows! Oh, those lows were lower than anyone should ever have to go – 10 degrees below hell.”
She published two volumes of memoirs, Lauren Bacall by Myself in 1979 and By Myself and Then Some in 1996.
In 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded her an honorary Oscar “in recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures”.
Filmography
- To Have and Have Not (1944)
- Confidential Agent (1945)
- The Big Sleep (1946)
- Dark Passage (1947)
- Key Largo (1948)
- Bright Leaf (1950)
- How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
- Blood Alley (1955)
- Written on the Wind (1956)
- Designing Woman (1957)
- The Gift of Love (1958)
- North West Frontier (1959)
- Shock Treatment (1964)
- Harper (1966)
- Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
- The Shootist (1976)
- The Fan (1981)
- Misery (1990)
- The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996)
