Lauren Bacall

Betty Joan Perske (September 16, 1924 – August 12, 2014), professionally known as Lauren Bacall, was an American actress.

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in the Bronx, New York City, the only child of Natalie (née Weinstein-Bacal; 1901–1969), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacal, and William Perske (1889–1982), who worked in sales.

Both of her parents were Jewish.

Her mother emigrated from Iași, Romania through Ellis Island.

Her father was born in New Jersey to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a predominantly Jewish community in present-day Belarus.

Bacall's parents divorced when she was five, after which she no longer saw her father.

She later took the Romanian form of her mother's last name, Bacall.

She was close to her mother, who remarried Lee Goldberg and moved to California after Bacall became a star.

Through her father, Bacall was related to Shimon Peres (born Szymon Perski), the eighth prime minister and ninth president of Israel.

Peres did not know about the relationship until Bacall told him.

Bacall's family moved soon after her birth to Brooklyn's Ocean Parkway.

Money from a wealthy family allowed Bacall to attend school at the Highland Manor Boarding School for Girls in Tarrytown, New York, a private boarding school founded by philanthropist Eugene Heitler Lehman, and Julia Richman High School in Manhattan.

In 1941, Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she dated classmate Kirk Douglas.

She worked as a theatre usher at the St. James Theatre and as a fashion model in department stores.

She made her acting debut on Broadway in 1942 at age 17 as a walk-on in Johnny 2 X 4.

By then, she lived with her mother at 75 Bank Street, and in 1942, she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village.

As a teenage fashion model, Bacall appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar and in magazines such as Vogue.

He then turned her over to Vreeland, who arranged for Louise Dahl-Wolfe to shoot Bacall in Kodachrome for the March 1943 cover.

The Harper's Bazaar cover caught the attention of "Slim" Keith, the wife of Hollywood producer and director Howard Hawks.

Keith urged her husband to invite Bacall to take a screen test for his forthcoming film To Have and Have Not.

Hawks asked his secretary to find more information about Bacall, but the secretary misunderstood and sent Bacall a ticket to travel to Hollywood for the audition.

After meeting Bacall in Hollywood, Hawks immediately signed her to a seven-year contract with a weekly salary of $100 and personally began to manage her career.

He changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose Bacall, a variant of her mother's maiden name, as her screen surname.

Slim Hawks also took Bacall under her wing, dressing Bacall stylishly and guiding her in matters of elegance, manners and taste.

At Hawks' suggestion, Bacall was trained by a voice coach to speak with a lower and deeper voice instead of her normally high-pitched, nasal voice.

As part of her training, Bacall was required to shout verses of Shakespeare for hours every day.

Bacall began a career as a model for the Walter Thornton Model Agency before making her film debut at the age of 20 as the leading lady opposite her future husband Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (1944).

She continued in the film noir genre with appearances alongside her new husband in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), and she starred in the romantic comedies How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck.

A 1948 article in Life magazine referred to her "cat-like grace, tawny blonde hair, and blue-green eyes."

Though Diana Vreeland is often credited with discovering Bacall for Harper's Bazaar, it was in fact Nicolas de Gunzburg who introduced Bacall to Vreeland.

He had first met Bacall at a New York club called Tony's, where de Gunzburg suggested that Bacall visit his Harper's Bazaar office the next day.

She portrayed the female lead in Written on the Wind (1956) which is considered one of Douglas Sirk's seminal films.

She starred alongside Paul Newman in the 1966 mystery film Harper.

She also worked on Broadway in musicals, earning Tony Awards for Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981).

She co-starred with John Wayne in his final film The Shootist (1976) by Wayne's request.

During the final stage of her career, she gained newfound success with a younger audience for major supporting roles in the films Misery (1990), Dogville (2003), and the English dubs of the animated films Howl's Moving Castle (2004) and Ernest & Celestine (2012).

For her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) she won a Golden Globe, and a SAG award, and was nominated for a BAFTA and an Academy Award.

She was named the 20th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute and received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 in recognition of her contribution to the Golden Age of motion pictures.

She was known for her alluring, sultry presence and her distinctive, husky voice.

Bacall was one of the last surviving major stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.