She was bold, even brash.
With her alluring looks and smoky voice, Lauren Bacall delivered classic lines, both on and off screen.
Her most famous line:
“You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow,” Lauren Bacall as Marie Browning in “To Have and Have Not.”
On being a legend:
“No, I don’t like legend. I mean, I don’t like the category. And to begin with, to me, a legend is something that is not on the Earth, that is dead,” she told CNN’s Larry King in 2005.
On director Howard Hawks and her screen name:
“He felt that Lauren Bacall was better sounding than Betty Bacall. He had a vision of his own. He was a svengali. He wanted to mold me. He wanted to control me. And he did until Mr. [Humphrey] Bogart got involved,” she told King in 2005.
On her persona:
“If there was one thing I had never been, it was mysterious, and if there was one thing I had never done, it was not talk,” she wrote in her autobiography, “Lauren Bacall: By Myself.”
On her breakup with Frank Sinatra:
“Frank did me a great favor. He saved me from the complete disaster our marriage would have been. But the truth is that he behaved like a complete s*** …. When I run into him now, we give each other a nice hello,” she told People in 1979.
On her relationship with Humphrey Bogart:
“I fairly often have thought how lucky I was. I knew everybody because I was married to Bogie, and that 25-year difference was the most fantastic thing for me to have in my life,” she told Vanity Fair in 2011. Bogart died in 1957.
On Hollywood and its golden age:
“My son tells me, ‘Do you realize you are the last one? The last person who was an eyewitness to the golden age?’ Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, ‘Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?’ ‘Well, yes, I think I was,’ I reply. You realize yourself when you start reflecting — because I don’t live in the past, although your past is so much a part of what you are — that you can’t ignore it. But I don’t look at scrapbooks. I could show you some, but I’d have to climb ladders, and I can’t climb,” she told Vanity Fair in 2011.
