Lauren Bacall (1924-2014) was the last Hollywood star of the forties – Parool.nl

13-08-14 11:50 – Source: Het Parool

Lauren Bacall in 1950 © getty

Finally,

American film star Lauren Bacall ( 89) is deceased. The actress starred in countless Hollywood classics. Her death was announced by the heirs of the Bogart family on Twitter

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On her nineteenth Bacall makes an entrance that has its place guaranteed in Hollywood history. In ‘To have and have-nots’ by Howard Hawks, she has just the star of the film, the 25 years old Humphrey Bogart, kissed. She’s wearing a robe and slips discreetly rushing towards the door. Then she says, with that distinctive low voice: ‘You do not have to act with me, Steve. You do not have to say anything and you do not have to do anything. ” And then she turns to half in the doorway. “Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, do not you, Steve? You just put your lips together and – slight pause – blow. In the next shot we see Bogart, the biggest male star of his time, nailed down to his chair, with a strange smile on his mouth.

Bogart was her first husband (he married for the fourth time ) and until his death in 1957 ‘Bogey’ and Bacall’s power couple of Hollywood. They made three films together, including the classic The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948). After the death of Bogart Bacall was for a time married to actor Jason Robards.

At the end of the forties began Bogart and Bacall, along with a number of colleagues, the Committee for the First Amendment that counterbalance needed offer to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the organization that the witch hunt led to alleged communists and gave rise to the blacklist in which people from the film industry came who refused to testify against colleagues. That blacklist made it impossible to get to work. In 1947, Bacall and Bogart flew to Washington, the American press in their wake, but their call to stop the hunt and to respect freedom of expression was in vain.

Bacall was on September 16, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York, born Betty Joan Perske daughter of a Polish father and a Romanian mother. After the divorce of her parents, she took the name of her mother (Bacal) and added an “L” shape. While she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts when she earned as a model.

In March 1943 she was on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. The wife of director Howard Hawks made him aware of the young woman. The women in the films of Hawks showed a new sound in Hollywood: complex, seductive, independently; and above equivalent to their male counterparts. ‘Hawksian “was the adjective that this was coined. And no woman embodied this new ideal better than Bacall. It was Hawks who her ‘Betty’ for ‘Lauren’ let trade and take her to a speech coach sent to work on seductive bass her.

In the sixties, took the work in the film industry, but had them much success on Broadway for her role in the musical Applause, she received a Tony Award. ‘They had style, they’ had grace “sings Madonna in Vogue about the Hollywood stars of the forties. Bacall was the last living embodiment of this golden time

She continued to old age working in film and theater.; in 2003 with Lars von Trier on Dogville. In 2009 she received an honorary Oscar for her entire oeuvre and the “central position they had taken in the golden age of cinema”

(By: Mark Moorman).