A secretary's misunderstanding sent a teenage Lauren Bacall to Hollywood
Howard Hawks only asked his secretary to find out more about the model on a Harper's Bazaar cover. She misread the request and mailed the girl a ticket to Hollywood. Within a year nineteen-year-old Lauren Bacall was starring opposite Humphrey Bogart, the man she would go on to marry.
She began life as Betty Joan Perske in the Bronx on September 16, 1924, only child of a medical-instruments salesman and a secretary whose family came from Iași in Romania. Her parents split when she was six and she lost touch with her father. She adopted her mother's surname, Bacal, and added an extra L. Through her father she was a second cousin of Shimon Peres, who learned of the link only when she told him. Wealthy uncles paid for boarding school, and in 1941 she spent a year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she dated classmate Kirk Douglas, while ushering at a Broadway theatre and modelling.
At 17 she walked on in the Broadway play Johnny 2x4 and was crowned Miss Greenwich Village. Nicolas de Gunzburg spotted her at a New York club and passed her to Diana Vreeland, who arranged for Louise Dahl-Wolfe to photograph her in Kodachrome for the March 1943 Harper's Bazaar cover. Hawks's wife, Slim Keith, saw it and urged him to screen-test her for To Have and Have Not.
That 1944 debut launched a run of film noir with Bogart, including The Big Sleep and Key Largo. She moved into comedy with How to Marry a Millionaire and took the lead in Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind. Broadway musicals earned her a pair of Tonys, first for Applause in 1970 and again for Woman of the Year in 1981, and she made her West End debut in the former.
Late in life came a second wave. The Mirror Has Two Faces in 1996 brought a Golden Globe, a SAG award and an Oscar nomination, and roles in Misery, Dogville and the English dub of Howl's Moving Castle introduced her to younger viewers. The American Film Institute ranked her the 20th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood, and she received an honorary Academy Award in 2009. She died on August 12, 2014, one of the last great names of the studio era.
Source: Lauren Bacall
