Bacall's life was legendary
NEW YORK — Lauren Bacall had one of those incredible lives.
The wife and co-star of Humphrey Bogart. A Tony Award-winning actress. A National Book Award-winning author. A giant of fashion. A friend of the Kennedys. One of the last survivors of Hollywood’s studio age.
A star almost from the moment she appeared on screen to the day she died, Tuesday, at age 89, at a New York City hospital.
“Stardom isn’t a career,” Bacall once observed, “it’s an accident.”
What a lucky accident it turned out to be.
Her career was one of great achievement and some frustration. The actress received a Golden Globe and an honorary Oscar and appeared in scores of film and TV productions. But not until 1996 did she receive an Academy Award nomination — as supporting actress for her role as Barbra Streisand’s mother in “The Mirror Has Two Faces.” Although a sentimental favorite, she was beaten by Juliette Binoche for her performance in “The English Patient.”
Bacall would outlive her first husband by more than 50 years, but never outlived their legend, which began in their first movie together, “To Have or Have Not.”
They were “Bogie and Bacall” — the hard-boiled couple who could fight and make up with the best of them. They were A-list glamour and B-movie danger. Unlike Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall were not a story of opposites attracting but of kindred, smoldering spirits. She was less than half Bogart’s age, yet as wise, and as jaded, as he was. They threw all-night parties, laughed at the snobs, palled around with Frank Sinatra and others and formed a gang of California carousers known as the Holmby Hills Rat Pack.
After Bogart’s death, she continued to forge her own distinct path. On television, in films, in her books, she was blunt, sardonic, demanding, loyal. Pity anyone who knocked Bogart, crossed one of her friends or voted Republican.
Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in the Bronx, the daughter of Jewish immigrants. Her parents divorced when Betty was 8, and the mother took part of her family name, Bacal. (Betty added the extra L when she became an actress.)
At first she dreamed of becoming a dancer, but thought herself too “gawky” and acting became her ambition.
She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and played a few walk-on roles in Broadway plays. The wife of film director Howard Hawks recommended her for movies, and Bacall went to Hollywood under a contract. “To Have and Have Not” came out in 1944.
After Bogart’s death in 1957, Bacall had a brief, disastrous engagement to Sinatra and a troubled, eight-year marriage to Jason Robards Jr. Professionally, she thrived on the stage and remained busy in films. She won Tonys for the Broadway musicals “Applause” and “Woman of the Year,” the latter a 1981 production in which she revived the role immortalized by her friend Hepburn on screen.
