Lauren Bacall, one of the last remaining
icons of
Born Betty Jean Perske in September 1924,
Bacall grew up as the only child of a Romanian-Jewish mother and Polish-Jewish
father in New York Bronx district. In 1944, Howard Hawks came across one of her modelling
shoots in Harper’s Bazaar and had her contracted to Warner Brothers. After a
successful screen test, the celebrated director told her he intended to cast
her alongside Bogart or Cary Grant. “I thought Cary Grant, great. Humphrey
Bogart‚ yuck,” she would later recall.
Nevertheless, her first screen role was
opposite Bogart in the 1944 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, To Have and
Have Not, when she was 19 and Bogie 44. She made a deep impression on her
co-star and audiences alike by delivering her most famous line in her uniquely
husky voice: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips
together and blow.”
Bacall continued on in the film noir genre,
with appearances in Bogart movies The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947),
and 
In 1999, Bacall was ranked #20 of the 25
actresses on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars list by the American Film
Institute. In 2009, she was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
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