Lauren Bacall, one of the last great movie stars of Hollywood’s golden era, has passed away at the age of 89. Hollywood Reporter reports that the cause of death was a stroke. She is survived by her two children with Humphrey Bogart, Steven and Leslie Bogart, and her son with Jason Robards, actor Sam Robards (“Treme”).
Bacall was a rarity in the Hollywood studio system, emerging as a fully formed movie star with her first ever on-screen role opposite future husband Humphrey Bogart in the classic 1944 Ernest Hemingway adaptation To Have and Have Not. The film’s director, Howard Hawks, discovered the former model after his wife found a picture of Lauren Bacall on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. Her sultry performance included what is now one of the most quoted lines of dialogue in movie history: “You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve? You just put your lips together and… blow.”
Lauren Bacall, causing quite the scandal in 1945 by sitting on piano played by Vice-President Harry Truman.
Lauren Bacall married Humphrey Bogart in 1945, in what is considered one of the great Hollywood on-screen/off-screen romances. They would star together in three more films before Bogart’s passing from esophageal cancer in 1957, including The Big Sleep, Key Largo and Dark Passage. “Bogey and Bacall” also co-starred in a syndicated radio series called “Bold Venture” from 1951 to 1952, which starred Bogart as the adventurous proprietor of a Cuban hotel and Bacall as his sexy sidekick. Bacall would re-marry in 1961 to actor Jason Robards, Jr., but the couple later divorced in 1969. Lauren Bacall wrote two autobiographies – Lauren Bacall By Myself (1978) and Now (1994) – in which she cited Robards’ alcoholism as the cause of the split.
It was nine years after her first film that Lauren Bacall starred in her first comedy, How to Marry a Millionaire, opposite Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, in which she gave an acclaimed performance. Bacall would retreated from cinema to perform on Broadway shortly after the death of her first husband, before returning to the screen in 1964’s Shock Treatment. Bacall would continue her stage work, winning two Tony Awards for Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981), and go on to star in the classic films Murder on the Orient Express, The Shootist, Misery and the English-language version of Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, providing the voice for “The Witch of the Wastes.”
Lauren Bacall would receive her only Oscar nomination for 1996’s romantic dramedy The Mirror Has Two Faces (she lost to The English Patient’s Juliette Binoche), but received an Honorary Academy Award recognizing “her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures” in 2010. Bacall’s final performance would be on an episode of “Family Guy,” guest-starring in the 2014 episode “Mom’s the Word.”
CraveOnline mourns the passing of one of cinema’s greatest actors, a distinctive and sultry on-screen presence whose dramatic abilities were only paralleled by her impressive comedic talents. Lauren Bacall had the kind of life and career that so many of us could only dream of, and although we celebrate her enduring legend, we also extend our thoughts and condolences to her family and many friends.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
