Description
LAUREN BACALL BIOGRAPHY :
Lauren Bacall (September 16, 1924 – August 12, 2014) was an American actress. She was named the 20th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute and received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 in recognition of her contribution to the Golden Age of motion pictures. She was known initially for her alluring, sultry presence and her distinctive, husky voice. Bacall was one of the last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Bacall began a career as a model for the Walter Thornton Modeling agency before making her film debut at the age of 19 as the leading lady opposite future husband Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944). She continued in the film noir genre with appearances alongside her new husband in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), and she starred in the romantic comedies How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. She co-starred with John Wayne in his final film The Shootist (1976) by Wayne’s personal request. She also worked on Broadway in musicals, earning Tony Awards for Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981). She won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).
Early life
Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York City, the only child of Natalie (née Weinstein-Bacal; 1901–1969), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacal, and William Perske (1889–1982), who worked in sales. Both of her parents were Jewish. Her mother emigrated from Iași, Romania, through Ellis Island. Her father was born in New Jersey, to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a predominantly Jewish community in present-day Belarus. Bacall’s parents divorced when she was five, after which she no longer saw her father. She later took the Romanian form of her mother’s last name, Bacall. Bacall was close to her mother, who remarried to Lee Goldberg and went to live in California after Bacall became a movie star. Through her father, she was a relative of Shimon Peres (born Szymon Perski), the eighth Prime Minister of Israel and ninth President of Israel. Peres attributed Bacall as the source of the claim of relation and said he knew nothing of it until she told him. Bacall’s family moved soon after her birth to Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway. Money from a wealthy family allowed Bacall to go to school at the Highland Manor Boarding School for Girls in Tarrytown, New York, a private boarding school founded by philanthropist Eugene Heitler Lehman, and at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan.
Early career and modeling
In 1941, Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she dated classmate Kirk Douglas, she worked as a theatre usher at the St. James Theatre and as a fashion model in department stores. She made her acting debut on Broadway in 1942, at age 17, as a walk-on in Johnny 2 X 4. By then, she lived with her mother at 75 Bank Street, and in 1942, she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village. As a teenage fashion model, she appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, and in magazines such as Vogue. An article in Life magazine in 1948 referred to her “cat-like grace, tawny blonde hair, and blue-green eyes”. Though Diana Vreeland is often credited with discovering Bacall for Harper’s Bazaar, it was in fact Nicolas de Gunzburg who introduced the 18-year-old to Vreeland. He had first met Bacall at Tony’s, a club in the East 50s. De Gunzburg suggested that Bacall stop by his Bazaar office the next day. He then turned her over to Vreeland, who arranged for Louise Dahl-Wolfe to shoot Bacall in Kodachrome for the March 1943 cover. The Harper’s Bazaar cover caught the attention of “Slim” Keith, the wife of Hollywood producer and director Howard Hawks. She urged her husband to have Bacall take a screen test for his forthcoming film, To Have and Have Not. Hawks asked his secretary to find out more about her, but the secretary misunderstood and sent Bacall a ticket to come to Hollywood for the audition. After meeting Bacall in Hollywood, Hawks immediately signed her to a seven-year contract, with a weekly salary of $100, and personally began to manage her career. He changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose “Bacall”, a variant of her mother’s maiden name, as her screen surname. Slim Hawks also took Bacall under her wing, dressing Bacall stylishly and guiding her in matters of elegance, manners, and taste. At Hawks’ suggestion, Bacall was also trained by a voice coach to make her voice lower and deeper, instead of her normal high-pitched, nasal voice. As part of her training, she was required to shout verses of Shakespeare for hours every day. Her height, at 5 feet 8+1⁄2 inches (1.74 meters), unusual among young actresses in the 1940s and 1950s, also helped her stand out. Her voice was characterized as a “smoky, sexual growl” by most critics, and a “throaty purr”. During her screen tests for To Have and Have Not (1944), Bacall was so nervous that, to minimize her quivering, she pressed her chin against her chest, faced the camera, and tilted her eyes upward. This effect, which came to be known as “The Look”, became another Bacall trademark, along with her sultry voice. Bacall’s character in the film used Slim Hawks’ nickname “Slim”, and Bogart used Howard Hawks’ nickname “Steve”. The on-set chemistry between the two was immediate, according to Bacall. She and Bogart, who was married at the time to Mayo Methot, began a romantic relationship several weeks into shooting. Bacall’s role in the script was originally much smaller, but during filming, her part was revised multiple times to extend it into the lead part that it became in the released film. Once released, To Have and Have Not catapulted Bacall into instant stardom, and her performance became the cornerstone of her star image, the impact of which extended into popular culture at large, even influencing fashion, as well as film-makers and other actors. Warner Bros. launched an extensive marketing campaign to promote the picture and to establish Bacall as a movie star. As part of the public relations push, Bacall made a visit to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 1945. It was there that Bacall’s press agent, chief of publicity at Warner Bros. Charlie Enfield, asked the 20-year-old Bacall to sit on the piano while U.S. Vice President Harry S. Truman played. After To Have and Have Not, Bacall was seen opposite Charles Boyer in Confidential Agent (1945), which was poorly received by critics. By her own estimation, it could have caused considerable damage to her career, but her next performance as the mysterious, acid-tongued Vivian Rutledge in Hawks’s film noir The Big Sleep (1946), co-starring Bogart, provided a quick career resurgence. The Big Sleep laid the foundation for her status as an icon of film noir. She would be strongly associated with the genre for the rest of her career, and would often be cast as variations of the independent and sultry femme fatale character of Vivian she played in the movie. As described by film scholar Joe McElhaney, “Vivian displays an almost total command of movement and gesture. She never crawls.” Bacall was cast with Bogart in two more films. In Dark Passage (1947), another film noir, she played an enigmatic San Francisco artist. “Miss Bacall … generates quite a lot of pressure as a sharp-eyed, knows-what-she-wants girl,” wrote Bosley Crowther of The New York Times of her performance. Bacall appeared in John Huston’s melodramatic suspense film Key Largo (1948) with Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lionel Barrymore. In the film, according to film critic Jessica Kiang, “Bacall brings an edge of ambivalence and independence to the role that makes her character much more interesting than was written.”
Personal life
On May 21, 1945, Bacall married Humphrey Bogart. Their wedding and honeymoon took place at Malabar Farm, Lucas, Ohio, the country home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, a close friend of Bogart. She was married to Bogart until he died in 1957. During the filming of The African Queen (1951), Bacall and Bogart became friends with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. She began to mix in non-acting circles, becoming friends with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the journalist Alistair Cooke. In 1952, she gave campaign speeches for Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson. Along with other Hollywood figures, Bacall was a strong opponent of McCarthyism. Bacall had a relationship with Frank Sinatra after Bogart’s death. During an interview with Turner Classic Movies’s Robert Osborne, Bacall stated that she had ended the romance, but, in her autobiography Lauren Bacall by Myself, she wrote that Sinatra ended the relationship abruptly after becoming upset that his marriage proposal had been leaked to the press, believing Bacall to be responsible. However, Bacall states in Lauren Bacall by Myself that when she was out with her friend Irving “Swifty” Lazar, they encountered the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, to whom Lazar revealed the news. Bacall wrote in By Myself that Sinatra only found out the truth years later. Bacall then met and began a relationship with Jason Robards. Their wedding was originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, on June 16, 1961. The wedding plans were shelved after Austrian authorities refused to grant the couple a marriage license, due to Robards being unable to produce divorce documents from his previous marriage, and Bacall being unable to produce Humphrey Bogart’s death certificate. They were also refused a marriage in Las Vegas, Nevada, due to similar documentation issues. On July 4, 1961, the couple drove to Ensenada, Mexico, where they wed. The couple divorced in 1969. According to Bacall’s autobiography, she divorced Robards mainly because of his alcoholism. Bacall had two children with Bogart and one with Robards. Son Stephen Humphrey Bogart (born January 6, 1949) is a news producer, documentary film maker, and author who is named after Bogart’s character in To Have and Have Not. Their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart (born August 23, 1952) is named after the actor Leslie Howard. A nurse and yoga instructor, she is married to Erich Schiffmann. In his 1995 memoir, Stephen Bogart wrote, “My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father was a lapsed Episcopalian”, and that he and his sister were raised Episcopalian “because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post-World War II years”. Sam Robards (born December 16, 1961), Bacall’s son with Robards, is an actor. Bacall wrote two autobiographies, Lauren Bacall by Myself (1978) and Now (1994). In 2006, the first volume of Lauren Bacall by Myself was reprinted as By Myself and Then Some with an extra chapter. In a 1996 interview, Bacall, reflecting on her life, told the interviewer Jeremy Isaacs that she had been lucky: I had one great marriage, I have three great children and four grandchildren. I am still alive. I still can function. I still can work … You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.
Death
Bacall died on August 12, 2014, one month before her 90th birthday, at her longtime apartment in The Dakota, the Upper West Side building near Central Park in Manhattan. According to her grandson Jamie Bogart, Bacall died after suffering a massive stroke. She was confirmed dead at New York–Presbyterian Hospital. Bacall had an estimated $26.6 million estate. The bulk of her estate was divided among her three children: Leslie Bogart, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, and Sam Robards. Additionally, Bacall left $250,000 each to her youngest grandsons, the sons of Sam Robards, for college.
Lauren Bacall (September 16, 1924 – August 12, 2014) was an American actress. She was named the 20th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute and received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 in recognition of her contribution to the Golden Age of motion pictures. She was known initially for her alluring, sultry presence and her distinctive, husky voice. Bacall was one of the last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Bacall began a career as a model for the Walter Thornton Modeling agency before making her film debut at the age of 19 as the leading lady opposite future husband Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944). She continued in the film noir genre with appearances alongside her new husband in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), and she starred in the romantic comedies How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. She co-starred with John Wayne in his final film The Shootist (1976) by Wayne’s personal request. She also worked on Broadway in musicals, earning Tony Awards for Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981). She won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).
Early life
Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York City, the only child of Natalie (née Weinstein-Bacal; 1901–1969), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacal, and William Perske (1889–1982), who worked in sales. Both of her parents were Jewish. Her mother emigrated from Iași, Romania, through Ellis Island. Her father was born in New Jersey, to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a predominantly Jewish community in present-day Belarus. Bacall’s parents divorced when she was five, after which she no longer saw her father. She later took the Romanian form of her mother’s last name, Bacall. Bacall was close to her mother, who remarried to Lee Goldberg and went to live in California after Bacall became a movie star. Through her father, she was a relative of Shimon Peres (born Szymon Perski), the eighth Prime Minister of Israel and ninth President of Israel. Peres attributed Bacall as the source of the claim of relation and said he knew nothing of it until she told him. Bacall’s family moved soon after her birth to Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway. Money from a wealthy family allowed Bacall to go to school at the Highland Manor Boarding School for Girls in Tarrytown, New York, a private boarding school founded by philanthropist Eugene Heitler Lehman, and at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan.
Early career and modeling
In 1941, Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she dated classmate Kirk Douglas, she worked as a theatre usher at the St. James Theatre and as a fashion model in department stores. She made her acting debut on Broadway in 1942, at age 17, as a walk-on in Johnny 2 X 4. By then, she lived with her mother at 75 Bank Street, and in 1942, she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village. As a teenage fashion model, she appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, and in magazines such as Vogue. An article in Life magazine in 1948 referred to her “cat-like grace, tawny blonde hair, and blue-green eyes”. Though Diana Vreeland is often credited with discovering Bacall for Harper’s Bazaar, it was in fact Nicolas de Gunzburg who introduced the 18-year-old to Vreeland. He had first met Bacall at Tony’s, a club in the East 50s. De Gunzburg suggested that Bacall stop by his Bazaar office the next day. He then turned her over to Vreeland, who arranged for Louise Dahl-Wolfe to shoot Bacall in Kodachrome for the March 1943 cover. The Harper’s Bazaar cover caught the attention of “Slim” Keith, the wife of Hollywood producer and director Howard Hawks. She urged her husband to have Bacall take a screen test for his forthcoming film, To Have and Have Not. Hawks asked his secretary to find out more about her, but the secretary misunderstood and sent Bacall a ticket to come to Hollywood for the audition. After meeting Bacall in Hollywood, Hawks immediately signed her to a seven-year contract, with a weekly salary of $100, and personally began to manage her career. He changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose “Bacall”, a variant of her mother’s maiden name, as her screen surname. Slim Hawks also took Bacall under her wing, dressing Bacall stylishly and guiding her in matters of elegance, manners, and taste. At Hawks’ suggestion, Bacall was also trained by a voice coach to make her voice lower and deeper, instead of her normal high-pitched, nasal voice. As part of her training, she was required to shout verses of Shakespeare for hours every day. Her height, at 5 feet 8+1⁄2 inches (1.74 meters), unusual among young actresses in the 1940s and 1950s, also helped her stand out. Her voice was characterized as a “smoky, sexual growl” by most critics, and a “throaty purr”. During her screen tests for To Have and Have Not (1944), Bacall was so nervous that, to minimize her quivering, she pressed her chin against her chest, faced the camera, and tilted her eyes upward. This effect, which came to be known as “The Look”, became another Bacall trademark, along with her sultry voice. Bacall’s character in the film used Slim Hawks’ nickname “Slim”, and Bogart used Howard Hawks’ nickname “Steve”. The on-set chemistry between the two was immediate, according to Bacall. She and Bogart, who was married at the time to Mayo Methot, began a romantic relationship several weeks into shooting. Bacall’s role in the script was originally much smaller, but during filming, her part was revised multiple times to extend it into the lead part that it became in the released film. Once released, To Have and Have Not catapulted Bacall into instant stardom, and her performance became the cornerstone of her star image, the impact of which extended into popular culture at large, even influencing fashion, as well as film-makers and other actors. Warner Bros. launched an extensive marketing campaign to promote the picture and to establish Bacall as a movie star. As part of the public relations push, Bacall made a visit to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 1945. It was there that Bacall’s press agent, chief of publicity at Warner Bros. Charlie Enfield, asked the 20-year-old Bacall to sit on the piano while U.S. Vice President Harry S. Truman played. After To Have and Have Not, Bacall was seen opposite Charles Boyer in Confidential Agent (1945), which was poorly received by critics. By her own estimation, it could have caused considerable damage to her career, but her next performance as the mysterious, acid-tongued Vivian Rutledge in Hawks’s film noir The Big Sleep (1946), co-starring Bogart, provided a quick career resurgence. The Big Sleep laid the foundation for her status as an icon of film noir. She would be strongly associated with the genre for the rest of her career, and would often be cast as variations of the independent and sultry femme fatale character of Vivian she played in the movie. As described by film scholar Joe McElhaney, “Vivian displays an almost total command of movement and gesture. She never crawls.” Bacall was cast with Bogart in two more films. In Dark Passage (1947), another film noir, she played an enigmatic San Francisco artist. “Miss Bacall … generates quite a lot of pressure as a sharp-eyed, knows-what-she-wants girl,” wrote Bosley Crowther of The New York Times of her performance. Bacall appeared in John Huston’s melodramatic suspense film Key Largo (1948) with Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lionel Barrymore. In the film, according to film critic Jessica Kiang, “Bacall brings an edge of ambivalence and independence to the role that makes her character much more interesting than was written.”
Personal life
On May 21, 1945, Bacall married Humphrey Bogart. Their wedding and honeymoon took place at Malabar Farm, Lucas, Ohio, the country home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, a close friend of Bogart. She was married to Bogart until he died in 1957. During the filming of The African Queen (1951), Bacall and Bogart became friends with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. She began to mix in non-acting circles, becoming friends with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the journalist Alistair Cooke. In 1952, she gave campaign speeches for Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson. Along with other Hollywood figures, Bacall was a strong opponent of McCarthyism. Bacall had a relationship with Frank Sinatra after Bogart’s death. During an interview with Turner Classic Movies’s Robert Osborne, Bacall stated that she had ended the romance, but, in her autobiography Lauren Bacall by Myself, she wrote that Sinatra ended the relationship abruptly after becoming upset that his marriage proposal had been leaked to the press, believing Bacall to be responsible. However, Bacall states in Lauren Bacall by Myself that when she was out with her friend Irving “Swifty” Lazar, they encountered the gossip columnist Louella Parsons, to whom Lazar revealed the news. Bacall wrote in By Myself that Sinatra only found out the truth years later. Bacall then met and began a relationship with Jason Robards. Their wedding was originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, on June 16, 1961. The wedding plans were shelved after Austrian authorities refused to grant the couple a marriage license, due to Robards being unable to produce divorce documents from his previous marriage, and Bacall being unable to produce Humphrey Bogart’s death certificate. They were also refused a marriage in Las Vegas, Nevada, due to similar documentation issues. On July 4, 1961, the couple drove to Ensenada, Mexico, where they wed. The couple divorced in 1969. According to Bacall’s autobiography, she divorced Robards mainly because of his alcoholism. Bacall had two children with Bogart and one with Robards. Son Stephen Humphrey Bogart (born January 6, 1949) is a news producer, documentary film maker, and author who is named after Bogart’s character in To Have and Have Not. Their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart (born August 23, 1952) is named after the actor Leslie Howard. A nurse and yoga instructor, she is married to Erich Schiffmann. In his 1995 memoir, Stephen Bogart wrote, “My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father was a lapsed Episcopalian”, and that he and his sister were raised Episcopalian “because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post-World War II years”. Sam Robards (born December 16, 1961), Bacall’s son with Robards, is an actor. Bacall wrote two autobiographies, Lauren Bacall by Myself (1978) and Now (1994). In 2006, the first volume of Lauren Bacall by Myself was reprinted as By Myself and Then Some with an extra chapter. In a 1996 interview, Bacall, reflecting on her life, told the interviewer Jeremy Isaacs that she had been lucky: I had one great marriage, I have three great children and four grandchildren. I am still alive. I still can function. I still can work … You just learn to cope with whatever you have to cope with. I spent my childhood in New York, riding on subways and buses. And you know what you learn if you’re a New Yorker? The world doesn’t owe you a damn thing.
Death
Bacall died on August 12, 2014, one month before her 90th birthday, at her longtime apartment in The Dakota, the Upper West Side building near Central Park in Manhattan. According to her grandson Jamie Bogart, Bacall died after suffering a massive stroke. She was confirmed dead at New York–Presbyterian Hospital. Bacall had an estimated $26.6 million estate. The bulk of her estate was divided among her three children: Leslie Bogart, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, and Sam Robards. Additionally, Bacall left $250,000 each to her youngest grandsons, the sons of Sam Robards, for college.
