There’s nothing as sexy as a 19-year-old Lauren Bacall. She showed it in her debut film ‘To Have and Have Not,’ with a voice that sounded like whiskey neat, and with her long hair that seemed to shine even in the darkened corners of noir drama. But she also had swagger — she had it in spades, and it was this quality that set her apart.
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart (pictured) starred together in the film 'Key Largo.' Her first film with Bogart, her future husband, was 'To Have and Have Not.'
Not just because of how she slinked through her debut film, 1944's "To Have and Have Not," with a voice that sounded like whiskey neat and the most come-hither directions ever put on film ("You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow"). Nor because of her long hair that seemed to shine even in the darkened corners of noir drama.
It was all that, yes, but it was also a word associated with men: swagger. Bacall had it in spades, and woe to the poor fathead or fall guy who considered her just another dame.
It was that quality that set Bacall apart. Humphrey Bogart, then 44, saw it in the Bronx-born beauty whose chin was lowered just slightly as she lifted her eyes in what would become a signature style (started as a way to fend off nervousness). When she was cast opposite Bacall in "Have Not," lightning struck. Left off to the side was the volatile Mayo Methot, Bogart's third wife. Eleven days after he divorced Methot in 1945, Bogart married Bacall.
Thus began one of mid-century America's great romantic pairings. Though Bacall did films with other leading men — Charles Boyer in "Confidential Agent," Kirk Douglas in "Young Man with a Horn" — it was her movies with Bogie (as she always, endearingly, called him in interviews) that anchored her reputation.
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Professionally, it was on view in "The Big Sleep" (1945), "Dark Passage" (1947) and "Key Largo" (1948), all three great films. Personally, it was shown off in photos of devoted domesticity with their two children, Stephen and Leslie.
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Lauren Bacall in 'Dogville,' which was released in 2003.
As she hit middle age in the 1960s, Bacall turned her swagger into steeliness, adding a layer of old-school reserve that served her well as a suspicious wife in the hit sex comedy "Sex and the Single Girl" (1964) and opposite Paul Newman in the 1966 P.I. flick "Harper."
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In 1974, she threw all that steeliness into her role as the matriarch
of a family bent on revenge in the Oscar-nominated "Murder on the Orient
Express," and her entrance in the '30s-set mystery seemed to come with
built-in applause. She was equally elegant opposite John Wayne's dying
gunfighter in "The Shootist" (1976).Lauren Bacall married Humphrey Bogart in 1945.
In 1996, Bacall's role as feminist elder statesman earned her a plum part playing director Barbra Streisand's astringent mother in "The Mirror Has Two Faces," and the result was her sole Oscar nomination. In 2003, she began a late-in-life experimental phase, appearing as a member of a brutal community in director Lars von Trier's stagey, sardonic "Dogville" (2003) and its sequel, "Manderlay" (2005).
Bacall continued to act well into her 80s (in 2007's political-sex satire "The Walker," and 2012's lark "The Forger"), and always owned whatever room she walked into. And if her swagger seemed forever reminiscent of another era, it seemed by design. She still wore it well and was never just another dame.
jneumaier@nydailynews.com
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