Studio-era siren

By N.B.

Lauren Bacall, an actress, died on August 12th, aged 89

WHENEVER a Hollywood star of a certain vintage dies, somebody always pronounces them The Last Of The Greats—the final link to a hallowed Golden Age of American cinema. But in the case of Lauren Bacall the honorific is more appropriate than usual. As long as Kirk Douglas is still with us, one bridge remains between the Hollywood of today and the 1940s, but Ms Bacall was the last female star of the studio-system era and she seemed to embody that period.

In part, this is a simple matter of longevity. Ms Bacall was a mere 19 when she made her debut in “To Have And Have Not” (1944), and so she has been central to Hollywood lore for 70 years. (Mr Douglas made his own debut in 1946, making him a relative newcomer.) But her near-legendary status is also due to her making such an immediate and forceful impact on the screen. Prior to “To Have And Have Not”, she had had little acting experience: she was a Bronx fashion model who had changed her name from Betty Joan Perske and had made only brief appearances on Broadway. But in Howard Hawks’s French Resistance thriller, there’s not a trace of girlish insecurity about her. Her strong-jawed beauty and immaculate styling help, of course, but it’s her insouciance that’s remarkable.

Watch the scene in which she asks Humphrey Bogart for a match in her deep drawl, glances at him with quiet amusement and lights her cigarette with maddening slowness before strolling out of his room. It’s easy to imagine that it’s Ms Bacall who is the sophisticated, seen-it-all veteran, while the 44-year-old Bogie is the nervous newcomer. Even as a teenager, she seemed to be older and classier than anyone else in the room—and she maintained that aura as the decades passed. She was just two years older than Marilyn Monroe when they traded banter in “How To Marry A Millionaire” in 1953, but her jaded poise contrasts so strikingly with Ms Monroe’s frothy clowning that, again, it seemed as if Ms Bacall came from an earlier, more dignified generation.

Perhaps that’s why she and Bogart were so well suited. They had an affair on the set of “To Have And Have Not” and were married the next year. He was 45, she was 20, and yet they remained together until Bogart’s death in 1957. And so it was that, as well as becoming a star at the very start of her career, Ms Bacall also became Hollywood royalty.

Following “To Have And Have Not”, she went onto star opposite Bogart in “The Big Sleep”, “Dark Passage” and “Key Largo”; she co-starred with Douglas in “Young Man With A Horn” in 1950. By then she already had a reputation for turning down parts that didn’t intrigue her. She did crop up in some celebrated films later in her career, including “Murder On The Orient Express” (1974), “The Shootist” (1976), “Misery” (1990), and “Dogville” (2003), but nowhere near as many as she could have done. She gave the impression that the movies needed her more than she needed them. The roles she did accept tended to intensify her public image as a grande dame, strong and imperious, and she left enough time between those roles to ensure that her participation in a film was a significant event. It also meant that her association with 1940s Hollywood was never obscured. If the Hollywood of recent times wasn’t quite worthy of her, that was its loss—and ours.