Lauren Bacall’s “Studied Carelessness”

In her second autobiography, Now, Lauren Bacall wrote of the word legend: “It’s a title and category I am less than fond of.” So choose a different word when you reflect on the actress whose style, substance, and voice made her one of the brightest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age—just make sure it has equal weight.

There was no slow and steady rise to the top for Bacall, who passed away in New York yesterday at the age of 89. She was born Betty Joan Perske in 1924, in Brooklyn, and skyrocketed to fame after the release of her first film, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, just 20 years later. Director Howard Hawkes, whose wife Slimhad noticed Bacall on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, gave Bacall her name and introduced her to her co-star Humphrey Bogart, with whom she’d make three more movies and a family.

Bacall was all woman: a sultry, confident actress beautiful enough to land magazine covers and confident enough to control a room full of men (The New York Times reports she was the “’den mother’ to the so-called Hollywood Rat Pack.”) In 1959 she told Vogue, “For my peculiar face I look best when I look as though I'm not wearing make-up.” She goes on to say that she hates dark lipstick and loves eye makeup, before concluding, "Some things that are good for photographic effects—or for a part—may not be any damn good for life.

Like makeup, Bacall took a less is more approach to fashion, wearing simply cut suits and coats, “what we call studied carelessness,” she told Vogue. And her hair, deeply parted and softly waved, never changed much over the years, flattering her striking face. She’s the ultimate example of a woman who was comfortable in her own skin, making her a role model, an icon, a Hollywood deity—anything but a legend.