Lauren Bacall, nicknamed “The Look,” was one of the last remaining vestiges of the golden age of Hollywood — with the mythology, unique beauty, and gravitas of all classic stars. In the wake of her death , this is how her legacy came to be and how it will live on.
Via Moviestore Collection / Rex / REX USA
Lauren Bacall was a woman of sharp angles: the arch of her famous brows, the turn of her squared shoulders, the exacting line of her cinched '40s suits. Her clipped speech, her exacting language. But there was a softness, too: the rolling waves of hair, the feline eyes, the plump — if always set — mouth. Bacall's voice was husky like a man's, yet strangely soothing. While watching clips of her last night, I had an overwhelming desire to fall asleep to a loop of her voice. She might steal your wallet as soon as you drift off, but that's just fulfilling her cinematic role as a femme fatale: There's danger in those curves.
Moviestore Collection / Rex / REX USA
Bacall was one of the last living remnants of classic Hollywood — an age when the studios made the images larger than life from raw star material. Even though the bulk of her career was in color, the shots that look most like Bacall, that reflect the way we think of her, are all in black and white, signifiers of a different, classier era. In these photos, Bacall's usually in some configuration with her first love and husband, Humphrey Bogart, whose own star morphed iconic long ago. But Bacall was much more than Bogie's wife: He'd always had a sort of gruff charisma, but it was only under Bacall's gaze that he became a legitimate sex object. No matter that they were separated by 25 years in age: They electrified each other.
Like so many classic Hollywood stars, Bacall came from a less-than-stellar background: She was the child of immigrants, was born in the Bronx, had a deadbeat father. She did some stage work in her teens, but didn't really have the chops so much as the look, which is how she caught the eye of the fashion designer at Harper's Bazaar who eventually put her on the cover of the magazine in a now-iconic (and very World War II) shot:
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