Lauren Bacall, the tough-talking femme fatale who taught Humphrey Bogart how to whistle, died on Tuesday at the age of 89, according to a statement from Bogart’s estate.

“With deep sorrow, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we

confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall,” read the brief but elegant

line, posted to Twitter with a picture of Bacall accepting an honorary

Oscar in 2009.

With deep sorrow, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall. pic.twitter.com/B8ZJnZtKhN — BogartEstate (@HumphreyBogart) August 12, 2014

Media reports suggested Bacall had suffered a powerful stroke. She died in New York, according to the managing partner of the Humphrey Bogart Estate, Robbert JF de Klerk, reached by the Associated Press. She was pronounced dead at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center at 5.21pm, according to Kathleen Robinson, the hospital’s media relations director.

Known for her smoky voice and sultry stare, Bacall raised the temperature in a quartet of hard-boiled 1940s thrillers, although her career went on to include musicals, melodramas and art-house controversies. She won Tony awards for her work on the Broadway stage and an honorary Oscar for her life’s work on screen.

Born Betty Joan Perske in New York, 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 success that made them the glamorous first couple of the American film noir.

Bacall felt that having children impeded her later career, although she went on to star alongside Marilyn Monroe in 1953’s How to Marry a Millionaire and Rock Hudson in Douglas Sirk’s swooning 1956 melodrama Written on the Wind.



Following Bogart’s death in 1957, she was married - between 1961 and 1969 - to the actor Jason Robards.

Other notable roles include Murder on the Orient Express and John Wayne’s 1976 screen swansong, The Shootist. In later life, she enjoyed a career renaissance, with supporting roles in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth and Lars von Trier’s provocative 2003 drama Dogville. She picked up a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination for her performance as Barbra Streisand’s overbearing mother in the 1996 film The Mirror Has Two Faces.



Off screen, Bacall threw her weight behind liberal causes, campaigning for Democratic hopefuls Adlai Stevenson and Robert Kennedy, and enjoyed a reputation for being fiery and outspoken; a woman who did not suffer fools gladly. “Happy schmappy,” she scoffed to Vanity Fair. “I don’t think anyone that has a brain can ever really be happy.”

She outlived many of her contemporaries. “What a terrible loss for us all,” said Barbra Streisand, who starred with Bacall in The Mirror Has Two Faces in 1996, in a statement. “First Robin [Williams], who was a genius, and now Lauren. It was my privilege to have known her, to have acted with her. And, most of all, to have had her as a wise and loving friend.”

In old age, Bacall raged against what she saw as the mediocrity of contemporary Hollywood, as represented by everything from the career of Tom Cruise to the Twilight movies that her granddaughter dragged her to see. “She said it was the greatest vampire film ever made,” Bacall recalled. “After the film was over, I wanted to smack her across the head with my shoe.”



Instead, Bacall bought the child a DVD of FW Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu. “Now that’s a vampire film,” she told her sternly.