The Life Cycle of a Star Image: Lauren Bacall from Ingenue to Hollywood Legend

Part 1: The Look Is Born

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, transforming her into a full-fledged Warner Bros. star by the start of 1945.

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