Lauren Bacall was an American actress. She is known for her distinctive voice and sultry looks.
Background
Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York,the only child of Natalie (née Weinstein; 1901–1977), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacall, and William Perske (1889–1982), who worked in sales. Both her parents were Jewish. According to Bacall, her mother emigrated from Iași, the Kingdom of Romania, through Ellis Island, and her father was born in New Jersey to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a significant center of Jewish life in present-day Belarus, then in the Russian Empire.
Soon after her birth, Bacall's family moved to Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway.
Her parents divorced when she was five; she later took the Romanian form of her mother's last name, Bacall. She no longer saw her father and formed a very close bond with her mother, who remarried Lee Goldberg and came 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.
Education
She was educated with the financial support of her wealthy uncles at a private boarding school founded by philanthropist Eugene Heitler Lehman, named The Highland Manor Boarding School for Girls, in Tarrytown, New York, and at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan.
In 1941, Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she was classmates with Kirk Douglas, while working as a theatre usher at the St. James Theatre and fashion model.
Bacall started working in high school as an usher, and then performed in plays both on and off Broadway. However, it was her work as a model, and in particular her appearance on a Harper's Bazaar cover in 1943, that caught the eye of Nancy Hawks, wife of Howard Hawks, a powerful Hollywood director. At Nancy's encouragement, Hawks gave Bacall a screen test. Hawks then brought her to Hollywood, taught her to speak in a lower register and convinced her to take the first name Lauren to deemphasize her Jewish heritage. For that reason, Bacall had never been entirely comfortable with the name the world knows her by.
Lauren Bacall first appeared on the silver screen when she was only 19, in 1944's To Have and Have Not, which starred Humphrey Bogart. On set for that film, Bacall developed her trademark gesture, "The Look." Oddly enough, it began as a defense against nerves: Bacall had to keep her chin pressed against her chest to keep from shaking until just before the cameras rolled, causing her to begin every shot bringing her gaze upward. The project launched Bacall toward her reputation as a leading lady in the film noir genre. Her poorly reviewed performance in the 1945 film Confidential Agent set her back slightly, but more success was to come.
During her marriage to Bogart, Lauren Bacall starred in only a few films. The pair co-starred in three more movies—The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948)—and had two children together, Stephen and Leslie. She also found success with the 1953 comedic outing How to Marry a Millionaire, co-starring Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe, with Bacall playing a suave mastermind.
Bacall went east to return to her very first love, the theater. "I finally felt that I came into my own when I went on the stage," she says. Her Broadway work over the coming years consisted of two comedies, Goodbye, Charlie (1959) and Cactus Flower (1965).
Bacall played the lead role in a new Broadway musical, Applause, which was based on the 1950 film All About Eve. Despite not being a singer, Bacall accepted the role and debuted in the spring of 1970 playing fictitious famed thespian Margo Channing. Bacall was a great success, and earned a Tony for Best Actress. She won her second Tony in 1981 for a semi-autobiographical role in the play Woman of the Year, the same year she was seen portraying a Broadway star in the big-screen thriller The Fan.
By this time, Bacall had lived a full life, having been an insider to the world of Hollywood and earned considerable respect as an actress, both onscreen and onstage. Bacall wrote her first memoir, By Myself, in 1978, which won a National Book Award, and published a second part, Now, in 1994.
In her later years, Bacall curtailed her film appearances. She was publicly disdainful of modern Hollywood, though she appeared with Nicole Kidman in two films, Dogville (2003) and Birth (2004). Bacall also had a starring role in the 2007 film The Walker with Woody Harrelson and Kristin Scott Thomas. And in 2014, she lent her voice to the animated series Family Guy in an episode entitled "Mom's the Word".
Still active and in relatively good health well into her 80s, Bacall was one of the last links left to the Golden Age of Hollywood, and time never dulled either her tongue or her wits.
Lauren Bacall died on August 12, 2014, at her longtime apartment in The Dakota, the Upper West Side building overlooking Central Park in Manhattan. She was 89 years old, five weeks short of her 90th birthday. According to her grandson Jamie Bogart, the actress died after suffering a massive stroke. She was confirmed dead at New York–Presbyterian Hospital. She is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
Lauren Bacall had mixed feelings about her Jewishness. In “By Myself,” her autobiography, she wrote that she “felt totally Jewish and always would,” yet chided herself for not being more open about her Jewish identity.
She said: “True, I didn’t go to synagogue, but I felt totally Jewish and always would. I certainly didn’t intend to convert to Episcopalianism for the children, or to deny my own heritage. At the same time I knew how important it could be to a child to have a religious identity.”
Politics
Bacall was a staunch liberal Democrat, and proclaimed her political views on numerous occasions. Bacall and Bogart were among about 80 Hollywood personalities to send a telegram protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigations of Americans suspected of Communism. The telegram said that investigating individuals' political beliefs violated the basic principles of American democracy. In October 1947, Bacall and Bogart traveled to Washington, D.C., along with a number of other Hollywood stars in a group that called itself the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), which also included Danny Kaye, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Ira Gershwin and Jane Wyatt.
She appeared alongside Humphrey Bogart in a photograph printed at the end of an article he wrote, titled "I'm No Communist", in the May 1948 edition of Photoplay magazine, written to counteract negative publicity resulting from his appearance before the House Committee. Bogart and Bacall distanced themselves from the Hollywood Ten, and said: "We're about as much in favor of Communism as J. Edgar Hoover."
Bacall campaigned for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election, accompanying him on motorcades along with Bogart, and flying east to help in the final laps of Stevenson's campaign in New York and Chicago. She also campaigned for Robert Kennedy in his 1964 run for the U.S. Senate.
In a 2005-interview with Larry King, Bacall described herself as "anti-Republican... A liberal. The L-word." She added that "being a liberal is the best thing on earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you're a liberal. You do not have a small mind."
Views
Quotations:
She told Vanity Fair, "I don't think anybody that has a brain can really be happy. What is there really to be happy about? I had a good growing-up life, I would say, but I wasn't really happy, because I was an only child, and I wasn't part of a whole family—what we in America consider the proper family, a father and a mother and child, which, of course, is a big crock, we know—and yet I had the greatest family anyone could wish for in everyone on my mother's side. So what you think is happy? Happy shmappy."
In a 1996 interview Bacall, reflecting on her life, told the interviewer 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", adding, "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."
"Imagination is the highest kite one can fly."
"I think your whole life shows in your face and you should be proud of that."
"I am not a has-been. I am a will be."
"A woman isn't complete without a man. But where do you find a man - a real man - these days?"
"You can't start worrying about what's going to happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now."
"A man's illness is his private territory and, no matter how much he loves you and how close you are, you stay an outsider. You are healthy."
"In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of publicity."
"I figure if I have my health, can pay the rent and I have my friends, I call it ’content.’"
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Even as a young actress, Bacall was known for her low, husky voice that accompanied her signature sultry look — chin down, eyes cast up — that earned her the nickname "The Look."
Quotes from others about the person
Peres has stated, "In 1952 or 1953, I came to New York... Lauren Bacall called me, said that she wanted to meet, and we did. We sat and talked about where our families came from, and discovered that we were from the same family... but I'm not exactly sure what our relation is... It was she who later said that she was my cousin; I didn't say that".
Interests
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.
Connections
Bacall and Bogart, who was 25 years her senior fell in love. Bogart was married at the time, and, within months, after some back and forth, divorced his wife. Bacall and Bogart married on May 21, 1945 in Ohio. The marriage was generally a happy one, though it did put a hold on Bacall's career.
In 1957, Bogart died of lung cancer. Bacall was devastated.
Shortly after Bogart's death in 1957, Bacall had a relationship with singer and actor Frank Sinatra. During an interview with Turner Classic Movies's Robert Osborne, Bacall stated that she had ended the romance, but, in her autobiography, she wrote that Sinatra ended the relationship abruptly after becoming angry that the story of his marriage proposal to Bacall had reached the press.
Bacall later met actor Jason Robards. Their marriage was originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, on June 16, 1961; however, the plans were shelved after Austrian authorities refused to grant the pair a marriage license. They were refused a marriage also in Las Vegas, Nevada. On July 4, 1961, the couple drove all the way 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 named after Bogart's character in To Have and Have Not. Their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart (born August 23, 1952) is named for actor Leslie Howard. A nurse and yoga instructor, she is married to Erich Schiffmann. Sam Robards (born December 16, 1961), Bacall's son with Robards, is an actor.