Lauren Bacall dead: Hollywood film noir legend dies aged 89

Lauren Bacall, one of the last remaining icons of Hollywood’s golden age, has died at her home in New York. She was 89. Bacall was best known for acting opposite her husband, Humphrey Bogart, in several 1940s classics including The Big Sleep, Key Largo and Dark Passage. Their 12-year marriage also made “Bogie and Bacall” one of the original Hollywood power couples.The actress is believed to have suffered a stroke on Tuesday morning at her apartment in Manhattan’s landmark Dakota Building, which overlooks Central Park. The Humphrey Bogart Estate announced her death on its Facebook page, saying, “With deep sorrow for the magnitude of our loss, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall.”
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’s 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.”