Sultry, husky-voiced movie star of '40s Lauren Bacall dies at 89

Lauren Bacall, shown with husband Humphrey Bogart on the set of The Big Sleep, died Tuesday, according to the Humphrey Bogart Estate. Bacall, 89, was known for her roles in To Have and Have Not and Key Largo, with Bogart, and How to Marry a Millionaire, with Marilyn Monroe.
Lauren Bacall, shown with husband Humphrey Bogart on the set of The Big Sleep, died Tuesday, according to the Humphrey Bogart Estate. Bacall, 89, was known for her roles in To Have and Have Not and Key Largo, with Bogart, and How to Marry a Millionaire, with Marilyn Monroe.

Lauren Bacall, whose husky voice and smoldering on-screen chemistry with her husband Humphrey Bogart made her a defining movie star of the 1940s, died Tuesday at age 89.

Robbert de Klerk, co-managing partner of the Humphrey Bogart Estate, confirmed the death in an email.

Bacall was one of the last surviving major stars of the studio system, which flourished from the silent-movie era to the dawn of the television age. She was a willowy, ash-blonde fashion model when veteran film director Howard Hawks plucked her from the pages of Harper's Bazaar in 1943 and molded her screen persona.

Hawks gave Bacall, then 19, an electrifying film debut in 1944's To Have and Have Not, based on an Ernest Hemingway story and set in the Caribbean during World War II. The movie shaped her public identity: a woman as sexually confident as she was formidable, or in Bogart's words, "steel with curves."

The sexual undercurrent was repeated in The Big Sleep (1946), with Bogart as Raymond Chandler's fictional private detective Philip Marlowe and Bacall as a resourceful divorcee.

She went on to act opposite some of the top leading men of her day -- Kirk Douglas (in Young Man with a Horn), Gary Cooper (Bright Leaf), John Wayne (Blood Alley) and Gregory Peck (Designing Woman) -- but the films were inconsistent in quality.

Bacall later became a disciplined Broadway performer and bedazzled a series of powerful men in arts and politics. After Bogart died in 1957, she was engaged to Frank Sinatra, then had a turbulent marriage to actor Jason Robards Jr.

Attracted to liberal politics, Bacall grew close to several Democratic leaders, including President Harry Truman (who once serenaded her on the piano), Robert F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson II. In 1947, she flew with Bogart to Washington as part of a group of actors and directors protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee and its investigation into alleged communist subversion in Hollywood.

Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on Sept. 16, 1924, into a middle-class Jewish family in New York City. She was a child when her father abandoned the family. She grew up with her mother, who took the surname Bacal; Betty later added the extra "L" and paired it with the screen name Lauren at director Hawks' behest.

She had modest training as an actress, but her looks led to a modeling career and an appearance on the cover of Harper's Bazaar in March 1943. Captivated by Bacall's face, Hawks put her under a seven-year contract and trained her in techniques of movie acting.

She and Bogart married in 1945, and later she said she discovered he was a complicated companion. She called him a "a man of such integrity, such honor and wit," but a heavy drinker who surrounded himself with other heavy drinkers, such as director John Huston. It was a "traumatic" experience for her, she later wrote, and she also was adjusting fitfully to her immediate stardom.

Bacall's career slumped markedly in the 1950s. She said she was more content to be Mrs. Humphrey Bogart instead of a movie star. She accompanied him on his film assignments, raised their two children, Stephen and Leslie, and helped host informal parties five nights a week at their home in Los Angeles.

When Bogart received a diagnosis of cancer of the esophagus in 1956, Bacall curtailed the couple's social activities and spent nearly all of her time caring for him. In her grief after he died the next year, Bacall said she fell into a depression.

In 1961, she wed Robards, a distinguished stage actor. He was a brilliant and passionate person, Bacall later said, but grew violent when drinking. The marriage produced a son, actor Sam Robards, before ending in divorce.

On Broadway, Bacall starred in George Axelrod's comedy Goodbye, Charlie (1959), playing a womanizer who returns from the grave as a woman. And in Abe Burrows' long-running Cactus Flower (1965), she was the prim assistant to a womanizing dentist.

She won two Tonys in roles made indelible onscreen by other powerful actresses. She played an aging actress threatened by an ambitious upstart in Applause (1970), a stage version of the Bette Davis film All About Eve. She also filled the Katharine Hepburn part of a high-powered journalist in Woman of the Year (1981).

Onscreen, Bacall matured into character parts that culminated in her Oscar nomination in a supporting role as Barbra Streisand's narcissistic mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996). She received an honorary Academy Award in 1999 that celebrated "her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures."

A Section on 08/13/2014

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