Film fans have endured a rough summer. We’ve lost many talented people who have brought us immeasurable joy. Today I’d like to celebrate the late great Lauren ‘Betty’ Bacall who mesmerized audiences with her incredible beauty, quick wit, smoky voice and sultry style. She was a beloved stage and screen actress but she was also much more including an award-winning writer, a socially conscious political activist, an avid fashion enthusiast who designed her own maternity clothes and a survivor who out-lived two husbands (Humphrey Bogart and Jason Robards) and managed to raise three children on her own. What follows is a stunning gallery of portraits as well as a collection of personal observations about Bacall from friends, acquaintances and family members who knew her and loved her.
“She’s a real Joe. You’ll fall in love with her like everybody else.”
— Humphrey Bogart
“Full of the devil.”
— One of Bacall’s (anonymous) high-school teachers
“She looked incredible. . .Her voice was husky, low and magnetized everyone in the place.”
— Patrice Chaplin
“The girl with the honey-colored eyes and baby leopard slouch.”
— Alistair Cooke
“She was gay and charming and a darling from first to last.”
— Noël Coward
“Bacall is to blame for getting me in the movies. She never should have talked to that producer. I might have fulfilled my ambition to be a star of the stage.”
— Kirk Douglas (thankfully for film fans his ambitions were thwarted)
“You can’t get a bad picture out of Bacall. There’s nothing eccentric about her. She’s perfect all over and yet she looks like nobody else.”
— Louise Dahl-Wolfe
“I kept looking at her and looking at her. In the first place, she is young and she has lovely tawny skin and she has the most fabulous sandy hair. Beautiful whether it’s straight or curled. In fact you have never seen her until you’ve seen her in her bright-green wrapper on the way to the outhouse in the early morning with her hair piled up on her head and no lipstick or anything else. Her sleepy-slanty green eyes and her common-sense look and her lost voice and her lanky figure and her apparent fund of pugilistic good nature. Once she gets on the track of anything, be it picking out a can of baked beans or doing her nails or typing a letter or sunbathing or talking to anyone, don’t try to get her on anything else – don’t try to hurry her – she is immovable. I gazed at her and wondered whether I would go mad with jealousy as I compared our ages – our skin – our hair – our natures.”
— Katharine Hepburn
“Lauren Bacall was a knockout. Tall and slender, she was a quintessential New Yorker whose presence was felt the minute she walked into a room. She was very much a man’s woman: tough, completely direct and without artifice.”
— Farley Granger
“Betty was the perfect mate for Bogie, and as they were both completely honest with each other and utterly straightforward in their approach to life, the friction points were few and far between. Occasionally there would be an almighty explosion, but it never lasted long, and with the air cleared, life went on more smoothly than ever. Betty gave as good as she got, but she also understood his love of his men friends, his need for male companionship, and she appreciated his longing for arguments, though she was never too happy when his extreme needling tactics were used to provoke them. She never was just a decoration in her husband’s home, though Bogie loved her to be beautiful and admired her looks, her taste, and her talent. He was, above all, proud of the fact that he had a partner with whom he could share everything good or bad. He never looked at another woman.”
— David Niven
“She was everything you expected her to be. Amazing politics, so substantial. A true artist.”
— Matthew Weiner
“I found her to be terrifically funny and vulnerable, and she made me laugh a lot.”
— Piper Laurie
“I think the qualities that my mother gave me include intelligence, humor, sensitivity, the ability to scrutinize people. I feel she gave me her sense of power and her sense of strength as she deals with the world around her. And her contribution to women and to women’s issues in addition to being a loving mother. She has also, just as a woman, been a great example for me.”
— Leslie Bogart
It was my privilege to have known her, to have acted with her, and to have directed her. And, most of all, to have had her as a wise and loving friend. She was an original. Even with all those great films we can visit again and again, she will be missed.”
— Barbra Streisand
I’ll let Gregory Peck have the last word about his his fiend and fellow actor in this wonderful tribute produced by TCM:
Further reading:
- The Los Angeles Times: Full Coverage Lauren Bacall | 1924-2014
- Fandor: Keyframe Daily | Lauren Bacall, 1924 – 2014
- Lauren Bacall’s remarkably honest account of Humphrey Bogart’s death
- F—k Yeah Lauren Bacall