Lauren Bacall

Actor

• Born: September 16, 1924
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: August 12, 2014
• Place of death: New York, New York

Bacall is an actor best known for her performances in such memorable films as To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and for her award-winning turns in the Broadway shows Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981).

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; theater

Early Life

Lauren Bacall (LAW-ruhn buh-KAWL) was born September 16, 1924, into a lower-middle-class family in New York City. Her mother, a Romanian immigrant named Natalie Bacal, worked as a secretary. Her father, William Perske, was a salesman (related to former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres). The couple divorced when their only child was around six years old, and she retained her mother's maiden name rather than her father's surname. Raised by her mother, with whom she had a warm and enduring relationship, and several maternal relatives, Bacall spent her early grade-school years in a boarding school, Highland Manor, in Tarrytown, New York, a safer environment than New York City public schools.

A good student, Bacall graduated from grade school at age eleven. She liked and played sports, such as volleyball, basketball, baseball, and swimming; she performed in plays and danced. She attended Julia Richman High School in New York City. She took Saturday-morning classes at the New York School of the Theater and dancing lessons, including ballet.

After high school, Bacall was determined to pursue an acting career. She could afford to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1940 for only a year. She found work as a model with the David Crystal agency at age sixteen. Working at this agency, she met other models who, when they learned she was Jewish, commented that she “didn’t look Jewish.” Incidents of outright anti-Semitism were not frequent, but she remembers that on a vacation trip to Florida with her mother, they were told there were no vacancies when the clerk discovered they were Jewish.

After the David Crystal job, she worked as a model for the Sam Friedlander agency and volunteered at the Stage Door Canteen. Later she got a job as an usher at a theater where she saw some of the leading actors of the time perform. Finally, in 1942, she landed a walk-on part in a debuting Broadway play, Johnny 2 x 4. At eighteen she posed for a Harper’s Bazaar photo spread, which led to opportunities that changed her life.

Life’s Work

Bacall’s picture in Harper’s Bazaar caught the attention of a Hollywood producer, and her acting career took off in 1944 with her costarring role with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. It was then that the young actor, whose birth name was Betty Joan, acquired the stage name Lauren Bacall. During the filming of this movie, she fell in love with Bogart, who was married at the time. When their relationship became serious, she had some trepidation about telling him she was Jewish. According to her account in her 1978 autobiography By Myself, her religion made no difference to him. As for Bacall, she said she loved being Jewish and had no problems with it, although she got a little tired of being told she “didn’t look” Jewish. She and Bogart married in 1945.

She made several films in the 1940s: Confidential Agent (1945) with Charles Boyer and The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948) with Bogart. She refused to do films that had no appeal to her and gained a reputation for being difficult. Still, the 1950s found her starring in critical and commercial favorites, such as Young Man with a Horn (1950), with Kirk Douglas and Doris Day; How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), with Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe; Written on the Wind (1956), with Rock Hudson; and Designing Woman (1957), with Gregory Peck.

In the 1950s she raised the two children she had with Bogart, son Stephen and daughter Leslie. By tradition the children were considered Jewish, but she and Bogart sent the children to an Episcopal Sunday school and ultimately allowed them to join the church, to which Bogart had formerly belonged. Allowing the children to become Episcopalian was a practical decision, but Bacall, who considered herself “totally Jewish” even if she did not go to synagogue, was determined that they remain aware of their Jewish heritage.

Bogart died in 1957, and Bacall’s movie career waned in the 1960s. She went back to Broadway, where she achieved several triumphs. In 1959, she starred in Goodbye, Charlie. Then, in 1965, she appeared in Cactus Flower. By 1970, when she appeared in Applause, her star was on the rise once again, and she won a Tony Award for her performance.

Meanwhile, between Broadway appearances, she made a few films with large all-star casts, such as Sex and the Single Girl (1964), with Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, and Tony Curtis; Harper (1966), with Paul Newman, Julie Harris, Shelley Winters, Janet Leigh, and Robert Wagner; and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), with Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Albert Finney. She appeared on television in episodes of the CBS drama Mr. Broadway. She was given the 1972 Sarah Siddons Award for her work in the Chicago theater.

A few years after Bogart’s death, Bacall married her second husband, stage actor Jason Robards, and they had a child, Sam. That marriage lasted from 1961 to 1969.

In the 1980s and 1990s Bacall made such films as The Fan (1981), Appointment with Death (1988), and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), for which she received a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nomination. She was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 1997 and in 1999 was voted, by the American Film Institute, one of the twenty-five most significant female movie stars in history. In 2006, she was awarded the first Katharine Hepburn Medal, which recognizes women whose lives and work “embody the intelligence, drive and independence” of four-time Academy Award winner Hepburn.

The year 1994 brought the publication of Bacall's second autobiography, Now, and a dozen years later, she expanded her first, retitling it By Myself and Then Some. Bacall continued to appear in feature films and to provide voiceovers for animated movies until 2012, with notable roles in Dogville (2003), Birth (2004), Manderlay (2005), Wide Blue Yonder (2010), and The Forger (2012). On August 12, 2014, Bacall died in New York City at the age of eighty-nine. She was survived by her three children, Stephen, Leslie, and Sam, and six grandchildren.

Significance

Becoming a breakout star in her first movie, marrying a legendary movie star, having an apparently storybook marriage, and appearing in films and stage plays that won critical acclaim, Bacall may have lived every aspiring actor’s fantasy. She has proved her mettle in practically every medium of entertainment, including radio and television. She even branched out in writing to win the 1980 National Book Award for Best Nonfiction Book for her first autobiography,By Myself. The world of entertainment honored her over the years with many lifetime achievement awards, including from the Stockholm Film Festival (2000) and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (2009), as well as the Kennedy Center Honors (1997) and the Bette Davis Medal of Honor (2008).

Critics have recalled her as a feminist actor and "living legend" from the golden age of film. She has been described as a sensual pathbreaker who imbued female characters with a sexual autonomy that was previously unseen in Hollywood and is remembered for her outspokenness on topics ranging from anticommunist investigations in the 1940s to the state of the contemporary entertainment industry.

Bibliography

Bacall, Lauren. By Myself and Then Some. New York: Harper, 2005. Print. An autobiography that incorporates her first memoir, beginning in her “confusing” childhood and detailing Bacall’s experiences as an aspiring actor, a wife, a mother, a widow, and a divorcé. She describes the many celebrities and fellow actors she encountered.

Bacall, Lauren. "To Have and Have Not." Interview by Matt Tyrnauer. Vanity Fair. Condé Nast, Mar. 2011. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

Brooks, Xan, and Rory Carroll. "Lauren Bacall, Smoky-Voiced Hollywood Legend, Dies at 89." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 Aug. 2014. Web. 13 Aug. 2014.

Lyman, Darryl. Great Jews in Entertainment. Middle Village: David, 2005. Print. Portraits and thumbnail sketches of more than two hundred Jews in the performing arts, Bacall among them.

Nemy, Enid. "Lauren Bacall, 89, Dies; in a Bygone Hollywood, She Purred Every Word." New York Times 13 Aug. 2014: A1. Print.

Slater, Elinor. Great Jewish Women. Middle Village: David, 2006. Print. Bacall’s is one of more than one hundred profiles of Jewish women who have made impressive contributions in their fields of endeavor. Relationships to Judaism are highlighted. Includes black and white photos.