75 Facts About Lauren Bacall

1.

Lauren Bacall was named the 20th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute and received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 in recognition of her contribution to the Golden Age of motion pictures.

2.

Lauren Bacall was known for her alluring, sultry presence and her distinctive, husky voice.

3.

Lauren Bacall began a career as a model for the Walter Thornton Model Agency before making her film debut at the age of 19 as the leading lady opposite her future husband Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not.

4.

Lauren Bacall continued in the film noir genre with appearances alongside her new husband in The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo, and she starred in the romantic comedies How to Marry a Millionaire with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and Designing Woman with Gregory Peck.

5.

Lauren Bacall portrayed the female lead in Written on the Wind which is considered one of Douglas Sirk's seminal films.

6.

Lauren Bacall starred alongside Paul Newman in the 1966 mystery film Harper.

7.

Lauren Bacall co-starred with John Wayne in his final film The Shootist by Wayne's request.

8.

Lauren Bacall worked on Broadway in musicals, earning Tony Awards for Applause and Woman of the Year.

9.

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16,1924, in the Bronx, New York City, the only child of Natalie, a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacal, and William Perske, who worked in sales.

10.

Lauren Bacall's mother emigrated from Iasi, Romania through Ellis Island.

11.

Lauren Bacall's father was born in New Jersey to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a predominantly Jewish community in present-day Belarus.

12.

Lauren Bacall's parents divorced when she was five, after which she no longer saw her father.

13.

Lauren Bacall later took the Romanian form of her mother's last name, Bacall.

14.

Lauren Bacall was close to her mother, who remarried to Lee Goldberg and moved to California after Bacall became a star.

15.

Lauren Bacall's family moved soon after her birth to Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway.

16.

Money from a wealthy family allowed Lauren Bacall to attend school at the Highland Manor Boarding School for Girls in Tarrytown, New York, a private boarding school founded by philanthropist Eugene Heitler Lehman, and at Julia Richman High School in Manhattan.

17.

In 1941, Lauren Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she dated classmate Kirk Douglas.

18.

Lauren Bacall worked as a theatre usher at the St James Theatre and as a fashion model in department stores.

19.

Lauren Bacall made her acting debut on Broadway in 1942 at age 17 as a walk-on in Johnny 2 X 4.

20.

Lauren Bacall had first met Bacall at a New York club called Tony's, where De Gunzburg suggested that Bacall visit his Harper's Bazaar office the next day.

21.

Lauren Bacall then turned her over to Vreeland, who arranged for Louise Dahl-Wolfe to shoot Bacall in Kodachrome for the March 1943 cover.

22.

Keith urged her husband to invite Lauren Bacall to take a screen test for his forthcoming film To Have and Have Not.

23.

Lauren Bacall changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose Bacall, a variant of her mother's maiden name, as her screen surname.

24.

At Hawks' suggestion, Lauren Bacall was trained by a voice coach to speak with a lower and deeper voice instead of her normally high-pitched, nasal voice.

25.

Lauren Bacall was often cast in roles that were variations of the independent and sultry femme fatale character of Vivian.

26.

Lauren Bacall rejected scripts that she did not find interesting, and thereby earned a reputation as difficult.

27.

Lauren Bacall was cast with Gary Cooper in Bright Leaf and as a two-faced femme fatale in Young Man with a Horn, a jazz musical co-starring Kirk Douglas, Doris Day and Hoagy Carmichael.

28.

From 1951 to 1952, Lauren Bacall costarred with Bogart in the syndicated action-adventure radio series Bold Venture.

29.

Lauren Bacall starred in the first CinemaScope comedy, How to Marry a Millionaire, a runaway hit among critics and at the box office that was directed by Jean Negulesco.

30.

Lauren Bacall received positive notices for her turn as witty gold-digger Schatze Page.

31.

Lauren Bacall starred in two feature films, The Cobweb and Blood Alley, both released in 1955.

32.

Lauren Bacall wrote in her autobiography that she did not think much of her role, but reviews were favorable.

33.

Lauren Bacall appeared in two more films in the 1950s: the Negulesco-directed melodrama The Gift of Love with Robert Stack and the British adventure film North West Frontier, which was a box-office hit.

34.

Lauren Bacall was seen in only a handful of films in the 1960s.

35.

Lauren Bacall starred on Broadway in Goodbye, Charlie in 1959, and went on to a successful stage career in Cactus Flower, Applause and Woman of the Year.

36.

Lauren Bacall won Tony Awards for her performances in Applause and Woman of the Year.

37.

In 1964, Lauren Bacall appeared in two episodes of Craig Stevens's Mr Broadway: first in "Take a Walk Through a Cemetery" with husband Jason Robards, Jr.

38.

In 1976, Lauren Bacall costarred in The Shootist with John Wayne, with whom she had worked in Blood Alley.

39.

Lauren Bacall was featured in Robert Altman's comedy Health, which underwent a troubled process of release after the change of the top management at 20th Century-Fox and saw a very limited release in theaters.

40.

The film received mixed reviews, especially following the recent murder of John Lennon and the similarities of the plot to the real event, but Lauren Bacall's performance gained a favorable reception.

41.

Lauren Bacall took a seven-year hiatus from films to perform on stage in Woman of the Year with costar Harry Guardino, for which she won her second Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, and other shows such as a 1985 adaptation of Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth under the direction of Harold Pinter.

42.

Lauren Bacall returned to film in 1988 with supporting roles in Danny Huston's Mr North and Michael Winner's Appointment with Death.

43.

Lauren Bacall starred in the British thriller Tree of Hands, based on a novel by Ruth Rendell, and in a television adaptation of the 1933 classic Dinner at Eight for Turner Television.

44.

In 1990, Lauren Bacall took a small but central role as James Caan's agent in Rob Reiner's Misery, based on the novel by Stephen King, and an important role in the British television movie A Little Piece of Sunshine, based on a novel by John le Carre.

45.

In 1993, Lauren Bacall was very active in television, pairing again with her lifelong friend Gregory Peck and his daughter Cecilia Peck in Arthur Penn's television movie The Portrait, and costarring with an all-star European cast in A Foreign Field.

46.

Lauren Bacall appeared in Robert Altman's Pret-a-Porter, an ensemble film set in Paris during fashion week.

47.

Years earlier, Bergman had played the role in the film version of Cactus Flower that Lauren Bacall had played on Broadway in 1965.

48.

Lauren Bacall was chosen by Barbra Streisand to play her mother in the romantic comedy The Mirror Has Two Faces, starring Jeff Bridges, George Segal and Brenda Vaccaro.

49.

Lauren Bacall was widely expected to win the Oscar, but she lost to Juliette Binoche for The English Patient.

50.

Lauren Bacall received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, and she was voted one of the 25 most significant female movie stars in history in 1999 by the American Film Institute.

51.

Lauren Bacall was a leading actress in Paul Schrader's The Walker.

52.

In 1999, Lauren Bacall starred on Broadway in a revival of Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings.

53.

Lauren Bacall was a celebrity spokesman for High Point coffee and Fancy Feast cat food.

54.

Lauren Bacall made a cameo appearance as herself on The Sopranos in the April 2006 episode "Luxury Lounge," during which her character was mugged by Christopher Moltisanti.

55.

Lauren Bacall delivered an address at the memorial service of Arthur M Schlesinger Jr.

56.

Lauren Bacall finished her role in The Forger in 2009.

57.

In July 2013, Lauren Bacall expressed interest in the film Trouble Is My Business.

58.

Lauren Bacall was married to Bogart until he died in 1957.

59.

Lauren Bacall began to mix in non-acting circles, becoming friends with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

60.

Lauren Bacall had a relationship with Frank Sinatra after Bogart's death.

61.

Lauren Bacall wrote in By Myself that Sinatra only found out the truth years later.

62.

Lauren Bacall then met and began a relationship with Jason Robards.

63.

The wedding plans were shelved after Austrian authorities refused to grant the couple a marriage license, due to Robards being unable to produce divorce documents from his previous marriage, and Lauren Bacall being unable to produce Humphrey Bogart's death certificate.

64.

Lauren Bacall had a romantic relationship with her Woman of the Year costar Harry Guardino in the early 1980s.

65.

Lauren Bacall had two children with Bogart and one with Robards.

66.

Lauren Bacall was a staunch liberal Democrat, and proclaimed her political views on numerous occasions.

67.

Lauren Bacall and Bogart were among about 80 Hollywood personalities to send a telegram protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee's investigations of Americans suspected of adhering to communism.

68.

In October 1947, Lauren Bacall and Bogart traveled to Washington, DC, along with a number of other Hollywood stars in a group that called itself the Committee for the First Amendment, which included Danny Kaye, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Groucho Marx, Olivia De Havilland, Ira Gershwin, and Jane Wyatt.

69.

Lauren Bacall appeared alongside Humphrey Bogart in a photograph printed at the end of an article he wrote, titled "I'm No Communist", in the May 1948 edition of Photoplay magazine, written to counteract negative publicity resulting from his appearance before the House Committee.

70.

Lauren Bacall campaigned for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election, accompanying him on motorcades along with Bogart, and flying east to help in the final laps of Stevenson's campaign in New York and Chicago.

71.

Lauren Bacall campaigned for Robert F Kennedy in his 1964 run for the US Senate.

72.

Lauren Bacall died on August 12,2014, one month before her 90th birthday, at her longtime apartment in The Dakota, the Upper West Side building near Central Park in Manhattan.

73.

Lauren Bacall was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

74.

At the time of her death, Lauren Bacall had an estimated $26.6 million estate.

75.

Additionally, Lauren Bacall left $250,000 each to her youngest grandsons, the sons of Sam Robards, for college.