20 Movies | Mondays in September
Her smoldering beauty made men whistle even before she suggested it in one of the screen’s most successful film debuts. She was half of an iconic movie team. And she followed a string of Hollywood successes with a return to Broadway, where she became an award-winning musical theater diva. Lauren Bacall may have refused the label “legend,” but her beauty, talent and wit earned her that title several times over. TCM celebrates Bacall in September with 20 films over four Mondays, including a special 100th birthday tribute September 16 featuring the four pictures she made with husband Humphrey Bogart.
Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in the Bronx to a Romanian immigrant mother and first-generation father. Her parents divorced when she was five. With little contact with her father, she later took her mother’s maiden name, Bacal, as her professional name. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she briefly dated Kirk Douglas, who would become a lifelong friend. At 17, she started acting and modeling. As Betty Bacal, she made her Broadway debut with a small role in Johnny 2 X 4 in 1942. The play flopped, but her image on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar caught the attention of director Howard Hawks’ wife, “Slim” Keith.
Hawks was looking for a new actress for his next project, and at his wife’s urging, he brought Bacall to Hollywood where she signed a contract shared for him and Warner Bros. He changed her first name to “Lauren,” added the second “l” at the end of her surname and sent her to a vocal coach to lower her voice to what would be hailed by critics as a “smoky, sexual growl.” Bacall tested for To Have and Have Not (1944) with a scene that wasn’t meant to stay in the script but was so effective, studio head Jack Warner insisted it be kept. As a result, she got to speak her most famous screen line, “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and…blow.” Her co-star, Humphrey Bogart, intimidated her at first, adding another element to her mystique. To keep her head from shaking, Bacall held her chin down against her chest, gazing up at Bogie in a manner that read as seductive and earned her the nickname “The Look.” Her role as a pickpocket and lounge singer made her an overnight star, while her off-screen rehearsals with Bogart turned into a raging romance. Unfortunately, he was still married to volatile actress Mayo Methot at the time, so the clandestine affair cooled once shooting had finished.
When they shot their second film together, Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946), the romance resumed. By this time, Bogart and Methot were headed for divorce. Shortly after the shoot ended, Bacall and Bogart married on May 21, 1945. The Big Sleep only played on military bases at first because of a wartime glut in film production. Instead, Bacall’s third film — Confidential Agent (1945) with Charles Boyer — became her second release. Her miscasting as a young British noblewoman was savaged by the critics, so Warner’s put The Big Sleep back into production to build up her role and add more scenes of sexual banter between her and Bogie. When the film came out a year later, it erased any memory of her failed second release and cemented both her stardom and the box-office power of Bogart and the woman he dubbed “Baby.” Bacall’s popularity skyrocketed, earning her a small cameo as herself in Two Guys from Milwaukee (1946), starring Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson, Joan Leslie and Janis Page. Bogart and Bacall would follow with two more film noirs, Dark Passage (1947) and John Huston’s Key Largo (1948). They re-teamed a final time in 1955 for a television production of “The Petrified Forest,” with Bogart re-creating a role he had played on Broadway and in the 1936 film version.
Taking a leaf from her husband’s book, Bacall routinely turned down roles she didn’t feel were suitable. The birth of her first child in 1949, Stephen, also kept her off the screen. As a result, Bacall only made two more films under her Warner Bros. contract: Young Man with a Horn (1950) as a wealthy femme fatale who steals jazz musician Kirk Douglas from singer Doris Day, and the Michael Curtiz Western Bright Leaf (1950), with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The birth of a second child in 1952, daughter Leslie, kept Bacall from acting for another three years, as she preferred motherhood to working.
At Bogart’s urging, she returned to the screen and established her skills as a comic actress by joining Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), the first film shot in Cinemascope, though it was the second released (after The Robe). By that point, her Warner Bros. contract had ended, leaving her free to work at other studios. She continued to demonstrate her comic skills in Woman’s World (1954), co-starring Fred MacMurray and Clifton Webb; Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck; and a 1956 television production of Blithe Spirit opposite the play’s author, Noël Coward. On the dramatic side, she replaced Grace Kelly in the all-star cast of Vincente Minnelli’s The Cobweb (1955) alongside Richard Widmark, Gloria Graham and Lillian Gish; and she teamed with Rock Hudson, Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone for Douglas Sirk’s deliciously melodramatic Written on the Wind (1956).
While making those films, Bacall was also nursing Bogart through the throat cancer that would take his life in 1957. In memory of their first film together, she put a whistle in his pocket at the funeral. Bacall was at a loss after Bogart’s death. She had a brief romance with his close friend Frank Sinatra that ended abruptly and painfully. Realizing that she wasn’t being offered the best film roles, she headed to New York for a return to Broadway. Her return to the stage was in the 1959 comedy Goodbye, Charlie, which ran four months, followed by the major hit, Cactus Flower, in 1965. Bacall married a second time to actor Jason Robards Jr. Members of the press corps relentless pointed out his resemblance to Bogart. They had one son, actor Sam Robards, before Bacall divorced him in 1969. Shortly after that, she scored a major Broadway triumph in Applause. Her role as Margo Channing in the musical version of All About Eve (1950) brought her the first of two Tony Awards and re-christened her as a musical star. She would follow that in 1981 with Katharine Hepburn’s role in the musical version of Woman of the Year, which led to her second Tony.
Bacall’s success on Broadway generated renewed interest in Hollywood, leading to a meaty supporting role as a mysterious actress in Sidney Lumet’s all-star Agatha Christie mystery Murder on the Orient Express (1974), with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. Bacall would return to Christie, this time opposite Peter Ustinov’s Poirot, in Appointment with Death (1988). She also scored a BAFTA nomination for Best Actress as John Wayne’s love interest in his final film, The Shootist (1976).
In 1990, Bacall’s film career moved into a new phase. Her performance as James Caan’s agent in Rob Reiner’s highly successful Stephen King thriller Misery introduced her to a new generation of fans as a character actress. She would cap that with an Oscar nomination, a Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for her savvy performance as Barbra Streisand’s mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). A year later, she received the Kennedy Center Honors.
As she moved into her 80s, Bacall continued to be active, making two films for Danish director Lars von Trier: Dogville (2003), with Nicole Kidman, and Manderlay (2005), with Bryce Dallas Howard. She starred in Jonathan Glazer’s controversial Birth (2004), also with Kidman. She also used her distinctive voice in the English-language dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s acclaimed anime Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and in commercials for Carnival Cruise Lines, the First Tuesday retail chain and Fancy Feast cat food.
In 2009, the Motion Picture Academy recognized her with an Honorary Award, “In recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures.” She starred in her final film, The Forger (2012), with Josh Hutcherson. In March 2014, she provided a guest voice for an episode of the animated series Family Guy, once again using that seductive growl of a voice as a woman who tempts the lead character to consider cheating on his wife. Five months later, she passed away from a stroke just a few weeks before her 90th birthday. “Her life speaks for itself,” said her son Stephen Bogart to The New York Times. “She lived a wonderful life, a magical life.”
