Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in New York City, to a middle-class family of Jewish descent. Her parents, Natalie Weinstein-Bacal and William Perske, divorced when she was five years old, and she rarely saw her father after that.
As a schoolgirl, Bacall initially wanted to be a dancer, but later shifted her focus to acting. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, after attending Highland Manor, a private boarding school in Tarrytown, New York, and Julia Richman High School.
Bacall's modeling career led her to appear on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, which caught the attention of director Howard Hawks' wife, who arranged for her to take a screen test. This led to her debut role in To Have and Have Not (1944) opposite Humphrey Bogart, whom she married in 1945.
Throughout her career, Bacall starred in numerous films, including The Big Sleep (1946),Dark Passage (1947),Key Largo (1948),Bright Leaf (1950),How to Marry a Millionaire (1953),Designing Woman (1957),and Harper (1966),among many others. She also appeared on Broadway in several plays, earning critical acclaim.
After a five-year hiatus from films, Bacall returned to the big screen in Shock Treatment (1964) and Sex and the Single Girl (1964). She continued to alternate between films and the stage, starring in Murder on the Orient Express (1974),The Shootist (1976),and The Fan (1981),among others.
In the 1980s, Bacall appeared in several films, including HealtH (1980),The Fan (1981),and Appointment with Death (1988). She continued to act in films and television throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, including Misery (1990),My Fellow Americans (1996),and The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).
Despite her age and failing health, Bacall made a small-scale comeback in the English-language dub of Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle (2004) and several other roles through 2008. She passed away on August 12, 2014, five weeks short of her 90th birthday.
