A Formidable Leading Lady Who Thought of Herself as a Character Actress

View the autosaveLauren Bacall: The Queen of Cool’By Anthony UzarowskiUniversity Press of Mississippi, 192 pagesShe is Slim in “To Have and Have Not,” the 1944 screen adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel. Her first role made her a star at the age of nineteen. Her lithe movements and low-pitched voice entranced the film’s hero, Humphrey Bogart, more than twice her age. He married her and they starred together in several films, including “Dark Passage” and “Key Largo.”In Anthony Uzarowski’s well-proportioned biography, Bacall’s celebrated marriage to Bogart, which ended in 1957 with his death, is given its due but does not dominate a career that included sensational success on stage, especially in the award winning musical, “Applause,” an adaptation of “All About Eve,” memorable for Bette Davis’s sardonic performance as the aging film star, Margo Channing.Bacall, born Betty Joan Perske in the Bronx, grew up fixated on acting, hoping one day to join the company of her favorite star, Bette Davis. Bacall’s early life and career seem like a fairy tale. By sixteen, she was modeling and featured on the cover of a national magazine, noticed by the wife of director Howard Hawks who was looking for a new star to groom. Hawks, who had a history of making antisemitic remarks, put her under personal contract, apparently unaware that she was Jewish. Evidently the worried Bacall never made Hawks the wiser. Hawks, though married to a very attractive ex-model, became disgruntled when Bogart won Bacall’s love. That was supposed to happen to Hawks, so he sold her contract.Bacall, happily married, continued her career, but never again reached quite the iconic status of “To Have and Have Not,” though she had the benefit of William Faulkner’s writing and Hawks’s direction in one more Hollywood classic, “The Big Sleep.” Mr. Uzarowski makes the compelling argument that the loss of Hawks damaged Bacall’s career, since her studio Warner Brothers did not know how to cast her.Bacall, in Mr. Uzarowski’s telling, is one of those actresses whose work was uneven but also maturing, fitfully, in occasional good screen roles, and then in her spectacular stage performances in “Applause,” “Cactus Flower,” and “Woman of the Year.” She was a very hard worker and a risk taker, braving roles in plays by Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter.Bacall bridled at being called a legend, wanting to be taken seriously as an actress, and took on a daring theater role in “Goodbye, Charlie” as a man who dies and is reborn in a woman’s body. It is the kind of challenge that an actress, tired of her public persona, finds attractive—as Eve Arden did who succeeded Bacall in a drama that had only a moderate success.Lauren Bacall pictured in 2007 Photo by Malcolm Taylor/Getty ImagesBacall continued to act into her seventies and eighties, eschewing plastic surgery, and driving herself ever harder, it seems, even as Hollywood rarely accorded her the kind of respect she received in the theater, both in the United States and in England. Bacall thought of herself as a character actress and was quite willing to take on supporting roles—most notably in “How to Marry a Millionaire,” starring with Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe.Bacall disliked saying much about her private life, which included a tempestuous Frank Sinatra courtship, and a troubled marriage to Jason Robards, Jr., often said to resemble Bogart. Mr. Uzarowski stumbles a bit when saying what Robards “must have” thought about the comparison. Bacall had a queenly, formidable presence as is evident in Mr. Uzarowski’s narrative during her hostile encounters with the press. That an actor had a private life that should be kept so means that the biographer cannot penetrate her guardedness and that of her children as well. Sometimes Mr. Uzarowski resorts to cliches in describing, for example, Bacall’s “rubbing shoulders” with the great and famous. I presume that unlike Oscar Wilde’s Dr. Chasuble, I’m not supposed to take such hackneyed expressions literally.Perhaps more could be said about Bacall’s popular and well written memoirs, and how she used her books to shape the public perception of her life. Mr. Uzarowski does well though, to show how deftly she adapted to the medium of television and how, to the last, she aged gracefully and courageously.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress” and is at work on a biography of Eve Arden.

A Formidable Leading Lady Who Thought of Herself as a Character Actress

More from the New York Sun

Let Some Oil Tankers Sail Through the Strait of Hormuz — World Oil Prices Will Retreat Big Time

‘What Is Chabad Exactly?’

On Taxes in New York, It’s Mamdani v. Hochul

More from the New York Sun

Let Some Oil Tankers Sail Through the Strait of Hormuz — World Oil Prices Will Retreat Big Time

‘What Is Chabad Exactly?’

On Taxes in New York, It’s Mamdani v. Hochul

‘Hoppers’ is the Best Pixar Film of the Decade

Florida Senate Advances Bill To Let State Leaders Designate Groups as Terrorists After Federal Judge Blocks Effort by DeSantis

One Week In, Will Trump and Netanyahu Have Time To Finish Reshaping the Mideast and the World?

State Department Says Charter Flights Are Evacuating Hundreds of Americans Stranded in Middle East

Mayor Mamdani’s Wife Liked Posts Cheering on Hamas’s October 7 Massacre: Report