A life in pictures: Lauren Bacall
Lauren Bacall: a career in clips
From the archive: Lauren Bacall interview
Lauren Bacall remembered for film noir classics
She was a nice Jewish girl brought up right by mother in two rooms on the wrong side of the tracks in Manhattan, her father long fled from their lives. She was so nervous in her first film role, at all of 19 years old, that her head shook; so she tilted her chin down to steady herself, and had to look up from under at the camera. She stood at the bedroom door of "a hotel in Martinique in the French West Indies" the Warner Bros lot in Hollywood looked up, and asked Humphrey Bogart for a match. And defined her life.
At that incendiary moment in 1944, Lauren Bacall, who has died aged 89, was still Betty Bacall, and had been recently Betty Perske; a stagestruck teenager whose poor family finances bought her a bare year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (fellow pupil and first crush, Kirk Douglas), and whose fought-for debut parts were in flops. She had to pay her way as an usherette and model, an unglam garment trade live dummy, until her photogenic potential was spotted by Diana Vreeland, fashion editor of Harper's Bazaar. Vreeland had an instinct for the face of the times, for a movie in a single still; and the shot that begat Bacall was a Bazaar cover, Betty besuited before a Red Cross office door. It's lit noirishly, and she is acting independent a frank, clever gal caught up in the war effort.
Continue reading...