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• 1 2015-04-04T13:10:20-07:00 Introduction 17 plain 2015-04-29T13:04:56-07:00 This project traces, documents, and interrogates the life cycle of the star image of actress Lauren Bacall, who was born on September 16, 1924, and died last August at the age of 89.  The daughter of Jewish parents and raised in an immigrant neighborhood in New York City, Bacall (born Betty Perske) began to study acting at the age of sixteen, helping to support herself and her family through various modeling jobs.  In 1943, the teenager was discovered on the cover of Harper's Bazaar by the wife of Hollywood director Howard Hawks.  Under personal contract to the director, Bacall was trained to assume a particular type of screen image that was an embodiment of Hawks's ideal femininity.  This active image-making was realized for the first time onscreen in To Have and Have Not (1944), a critical and box-office success that launched Bacall's career.  In comparison to some of her contemporaries, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Audrey Hepburn, Bacall's screen presence was not particularly prolific.  Her emergence in the public eye occurred on the cusp of major sociocultural and economic shifts in the United States that were reflected in the entertainment industry.  After Bacall's high-profile marriage to top actor Humphrey Bogart, she allowed her work to take a backseat to her private life, and her minimal professional visibility during this time hindered her ability to maintain a viable career after Bogart's death in 1957.  Bacall instead found steady employment on Broadway stage through the 1960s and 1970s, winning a Tony Award along the way for her starring performance in Applause (1970).  Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a number of major figures from the Studio Era began to acknowledge the cultural endurance of films and star images and to engage directly with those legacies in the media.  Katharine Hepburn, to offer a similar example, began to speak publicly about her secret relationship with Spencer Tracy around the same time, acting as the host of a television documentary on the actor's life in 1986. By Myself, Bacall's best-selling memoir, was first published in September 1980, and it marks the actress's first formal engagement with the legacies of not only her own Hollywood stardom, but also that of her husband. In the 1990s, Bacall participated in several documentaries on Bogart and published two additional autobiographies in which she reflected, at least in part, on her life with the actor and her personal and professional relationship to his name.  Much of the discourse on Bacall, in both scholarly and popular contexts, focuses on this relationship rather than the individual actress.  Among the goals of this investigation is to negotiate this contradiction in feminist terms; there is, arguably, value in both halves of this divided star image.  Each of the following three sections will analyze a particular moment in the trajectory from starlet to legend, weighing political and social context against contemporary perspectives in the hopes of locating a solution to the issue of female agency in cultural nostalgia.