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Lauren Bacall, the actress whose provocative glamour elevated her to stardom in Hollywood’s golden age and whose lasting mystique put her on a plateau in American culture that few stars reach, died Tuesday in New York. She was 89.

With an insinuating pose and a seductive, throaty voice, Bacall shot to fame in 1944 with her first movie, Howard Hawks’ adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel “To Have and Have Not,” playing opposite Humphrey Bogart, who became her lover on the set and later her husband.

It was a smashing debut sealed with a handful of lines now engraved in Hollywood history.

The film was the first of more than 40 for Bacall, among them “The Big Sleep” and “Key Largo” with Bogart, “How to Marry a Millionaire” with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, “Designing Woman” with Gregory Peck, the all-star “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974) and, later in her career, Lars von Trier’s “Dogville” (2003) and “Manderlay” (2005) and Robert Altman’s “Prjt-‘- Porter” (1994).

Bacall won Tonys for her starring roles in two musicals adapted from classic films: “Applause” (1970), based on “All About Eve,” and “Woman of the Year” (1981), based on the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn movie of the same name.

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She also won a National Book Award in 1980 for the first of her two autobiographies, “Lauren Bacall: By Myself.”

She played Marie Browning, known as Slim, an American femme fatale who becomes romantically involved with Bogart’s jaded fishing-boat captain, Harry Morgan, known as Steve, in wartime Martinique. Her deep voice and the seductive way she looked at Bogart in the film attracted attention.

Her happiness alternated with despair. Bogart returned to his wife several times before he accepted that the marriage could not be saved. He and Bacall were married on May 21, 1945, at Malabar Farm in Lucas, Ohio, the home of Bogart’s close friend writer Louis Bromfield. Bogart was 45; Bacall was 20.

Bogart died of cancer in January 1957 at the age of 57. Bacall moved to New York in 1958 and, three years later, married another leading actor, Jason Robards Jr., settling in the Dakota, on Central Park West, where she continued to live until her death. They had a son, actor Sam Robards, and were divorced in 1969. She is survived by her sons, Stephen Bogart and Sam Robards; her daughter, Leslie Bogart; and six grandchildren. Robards died in 2000.

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske in Brooklyn on Sept. 16, 1924, the daughter of William and Natalie Perske, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Romania.



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