Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York City, the only child of Natalie (née Weinstein), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacal, and William Perske, who worked in sales. Both of her parents were Jewish. Her mother emigrated from Iași, the Kingdom of Romania, through Ellis Island. Her father was born in New Jersey, to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a significant center of Jewish life, in present-day Belarus.

A television version of Bogart’s early film success, The Petrified Forest (1955), was performed as a live installment of Producers’ Showcase, a weekly dramatic anthology, featuring Bogart once more as Duke Mantee, Henry Fonda as Alan, and Bacall as Gabrielle, the parts originally played in the 1936 movie by Leslie Howard and Bette Davis. In the late 1990s, Bacall donated the only known kinescope of the 1955 performance to The Museum of Television & Radio (now the Paley Center for Media), where it remains archived for viewing in New York City and Los Angeles.

Applause was a musical version of the film All About Eve, in which Bette Davis had starred as stage diva Margo Channing. According to Bacall’s autobiography, she and a girlfriend won an opportunity in 1940 to meet her idol Bette Davis at Davis’ hotel. Years later, Davis visited Bacall backstage to congratulate her on her performance in Applause. Davis told Bacall, “You’re the only one who could have played the part.”

In 1941, Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she was a classmate of Kirk Douglas, while working as a theatre usher at the St. James Theatre and fashion model.

She made her acting debut on Broadway in 1942, at age 17, as a walk-on in Johnny 2 X 4. By then, she lived with her mother at 75 Bank Street, and in 1942, she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village.

Warner Bros. launched an extensive marketing campaign to promote the picture and to establish Bacall as a movie star. As part of the public relations push, Bacall made a visit to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 1945. It was there that Bacall’s press agent, chief of publicity at Warner Bros. Charlie Enfield, asked the 20-year-old Bacall to sit on the piano while U.S. Vice President Harry S. Truman played.

On May 21, 1945, Bacall married Humphrey Bogart. Their wedding and honeymoon took place at Malabar Farm, Lucas, Ohio, the country home of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, a close friend of Bogart. She was married to Bogart until he died in 1957.

Bacall was a staunch liberal Democrat, and proclaimed her political views on numerous occasions. Bacall and Bogart were among about 80 Hollywood personalities to send a telegram protesting the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations of Americans suspected of adhering to communism. The telegram said that investigating individuals’ political beliefs violated the basic principles of American democracy. In October 1947, Bacall and Bogart traveled to Washington, D.C., along with a number of other Hollywood stars in a group that called itself the Committee for the First Amendment (CFA), which also included Danny Kaye, John Garfield, Gene Kelly, John Huston, Ira Gershwin, and Jane Wyatt.

As a teenage fashion model, she appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar, as well as in magazines such as Vogue. An article in Life magazine in 1948 referred to her “cat-like grace, tawny blonde hair, and blue-green eyes”.

From 1951 to 1952, Bacall co-starred with Bogart in the syndicated action-adventure radio series Bold Venture.

During the filming of The African Queen (1951), Bacall and Bogart became friends with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. She began to mix in non-acting circles, becoming friends with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and the journalist Alistair Cooke. In 1952, she gave campaign speeches for Democratic presidential contender Adlai Stevenson. Along with other Hollywood figures, Bacall was a strong opponent of McCarthyism.

Bacall campaigned for Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election, accompanying him on motorcades along with Bogart, and flying east to help in the final laps of Stevenson’s campaign in New York and Chicago. She also campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy in his 1964 run for the U.S. Senate.

Bacall starred in two feature films, The Cobweb and Blood Alley, which were both released in 1955. Directed by Vincente Minnelli, The Cobweb takes place at a mental institution in which Bacall’s character works as a therapist. It was her second collaboration with Charles Boyer and the film also starred Richard Widmark and Lillian Gish. “In the only two really sympathetic roles, Mr. Widmark is excellent and Miss Bacall shrewdly underplays,” wrote The New York Times critic.

While struggling at home with Bogart suffering from terminal esophageal cancer, Bacall starred with Gregory Peck in Designing Woman (1957) to solid reviews. The musical comedy was her second feature with director Vincente Minnelli and was released in New York on May 16, 1957, four months after Bogart’s death on January 14.

Bacall was seen in only a handful of films in the 1960s. She starred on Broadway in Goodbye, Charlie in 1959, and went on to have a successful on-stage career in Cactus Flower (1965), Applause (1970), and Woman of the Year (1981). She won Tony Awards for her performances in the latter two.

Bacall then met and began a relationship with Jason Robards. Their marriage was originally scheduled to take place in Vienna, Austria, on June 16, 1961; however, the plans were shelved after Austrian authorities refused to grant the couple a marriage license. They were refused a marriage also in Las Vegas, Nevada. On July 4, 1961, the couple drove to Ensenada, Mexico, where they wed. The couple divorced in 1969. According to Bacall’s autobiography, she divorced Robards mainly because of his alcoholism.

In 1964, she appeared in two episodes of Craig Stevens’s Mr. Broadway: first in “Take a Walk Through a Cemetery” with then husband, Jason Robards, Jr., and later as Barbara Lake in the episode “Something to Sing About” co-starring future co-star Balsam.

For her work in the Chicago theatre, Bacall won the Sarah Siddons Award in 1972, and again in 1984.

In 1976, she co-starred with John Wayne in The Shootist. The two became friends, despite significant political differences between them. They had also worked together in Blood Alley (1955).

Bacall appeared in the star vehicle The Fan released in 1981. The film received mixed reviews, but her performance gained a favorable reception. Variety magazine wrote that Bacall and director Edward Bianchi “make the audience care what happens” to her character.

Bacall had two children with Bogart and one with Robards. Son Stephen Humphrey Bogart (born January 6, 1949) is a news producer, documentary film maker, and author who is named after Bogart’s character in To Have and Have Not. Their daughter Leslie Howard Bogart (born August 23, 1952) is named after the actor Leslie Howard. A nurse and yoga instructor, she is married to Erich Schiffmann. In his 1995 memoir, Stephen Bogart wrote, “My mother was a lapsed Jew, and my father was a lapsed Episcopalian”, and that he and his sister were raised Episcopalian “because my mother felt that would make life easier for Leslie and me during those post-World War II years”. Sam Robards (born December 16, 1961), Bacall’s son with Robards, is an actor.

In a 1996 interview, Bacall, reflecting on her life, told the interviewer Jeremy Isaacs that she had been lucky:

Bacall received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, and she was voted one of the 25 most significant female movie stars in history in 1999 by the American Film Institute. Her movie career saw something of a renaissance, and she attracted respectful notices for her performances in high-profile projects such as Dogville (2003) and Birth (2004), both with Nicole Kidman, and in Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) as the Witch of the Waste. She was a leading actress in Paul Schrader’s The Walker (2007).

In 1999, Bacall starred on Broadway in a revival of Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings. Her commercial ventures in the 2000s included being a spokesman for the Tuesday Morning discount chain and producing a jewelry line with the Weinman Brothers. She was also a celebrity spokesman for High Point coffee and Fancy Feast cat food. In March 2006, she was at the 78th Annual Academy Awards introducing a film montage dedicated to film noir. She made a cameo appearance as herself on The Sopranos in the April 2006 episode “Luxury Lounge”, during which she was mugged by Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli).

In a 2005 interview with Larry King, Bacall described herself as “anti-Republican… A liberal. The L-word”. She added that “being a liberal is the best thing on Earth you can be. You are welcoming to everyone when you’re a liberal. You do not have a small mind.”

In September 2006, Bryn Mawr College awarded Bacall their Katharine Hepburn Medal, which recognizes “women whose lives, work, and contributions embody the intelligence, drive, and independence” of Hepburn. She gave an address at the memorial service of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. at the Reform Club in London in June 2007. She finished her role in The Forger in 2009. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her an Honorary Academy Award at the inaugural Governors Awards on November 14, 2009.

Bacall wrote two autobiographies, Lauren Bacall by Myself (1978) and Now (1994). In 2006, the first volume of Lauren Bacall by Myself was reprinted as By Myself and Then Some with an extra chapter.

In July 2013, Bacall expressed interest in the film Trouble Is My Business. In November, she joined the English dub voice cast for StudioCanal’s animated film Ernest & Celestine. Her final role was in 2014, a guest vocal appearance in the Family Guy episode “Mom’s the Word”.

Bacall died on August 12, 2014, one month before her 90th birthday, at her longtime apartment in The Dakota, the Upper West Side building near Central Park in Manhattan. According to her grandson Jamie Bogart, Bacall died after suffering a massive stroke. She was confirmed dead at New York–Presbyterian Hospital.