Lauren Bacall

The Chin-Down Trick

Betty Joan Perske was nineteen when Howard Hawks asked her to lower her chin and look up. It was not a studied pose meant to seduce, but a trick to keep the nerves from showing in her trembling. That gaze came to be known as The Look and became the foundation of one of the toughest presences on screen.

Hawks wanted a woman who could talk to men as an equal. He found that girl on a Harper's Bazaar cover and molded her into Lauren Bacall. He made her read aloud for hours to lower the pitch of her voice and achieve that texture of sandpaper and silk that set her apart from the ingénues of the era.

That baritone voice was not natural.

In 1944, she made her debut in To Have and Have Not alongside Humphrey Bogart. The chemistry was so real that the director had to expand their scenes because the tension between them overshadowed the original footage. And so began a run of four films together that defined the film noir of the 1940s.

But the industry is cruel to actresses who grow older. After Bogart died in 1957, her film career entered a phase of minor titles and uninspiring projects. So she decided to leave for New York to try her luck on stage.

Two Tony Awards to Forget Movies

On Broadway, she found the respect that Hollywood had denied her because of her age. She won her first Tony Award in 1970 for the musical Applause, an adaptation of All About Eve. There she proved she could sing and dance with an energy nobody expected from a film noir star.

She pulled off the same feat in 1981 with Woman of the Year. Her direct style and her refusal to go under the knife to erase the passage of time made her a figure respected by the new generation of directors. Yet she always kept a careful distance from studio fame.

Bogart died in 1957, and the set fell apart.

Because Bacall never wanted to be a relic of the past. In 1996, she accepted a supporting role in How to Be Very, Very Popular under the direction of Barbra Streisand. That performance earned her her only Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress.

The Academy's Snub in 1996

She lost the award to Juliette Binoche in one of the most talked-about upsets in Academy history. But in 2009, the organization tried to make up for the oversight by giving her an honorary Oscar for her entire career. She accepted it with the same dry elegance as always.

In 2003, she worked with Lars von Trier on Dogville. It was a risky decision that took her to a minimalist set in Sweden alongside Nicole Kidman. She accepted the challenge because she preferred the risk of a European auteur to the comfort of a predictable script in California.

Her last film appearance was voicing a character in the animated film Ernest & Celestine in 2012. She rarely left her home by then, but she still kept the spirited personality that intimidated even the most seasoned interviewers.

And the gamble paid off.

Lauren Bacall died on August 12, 2014, in her apartment in the Dakota building in New York. She was eighty-nine and suffered a massive stroke. Her net worth at death was estimated at about fifty million dollars, which was divided among her three children and her grandchildren.