Born Betty Joan Perske in New York, Lauren Bacall initially worked as an usherette and a Vogue model before moving to Hollywood at the age of 19. Director Howard Hawks paid her $125 a week for what would prove to be her breakthrough role in the 1944 thriller To Have and Have Not. “You know how to whistle, don’t you?” she purred at co-star Humphrey Bogart. “You just put your lips together and blow.”
Bogart, she would later claim, was the love of her life. The pair married the following year and went on to cement their creative partnership on The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo, a run of successful pictures that made them the glamorous first couple of the American film noir.
