When Lauren Bacall made her film debut in the 1944 drama “To Have and Have Not,” she created a sensation with her sultry beauty and insouciant persona. Anthony Uzarowski’s new biography on Bacall, “Lauren Bacall: The Queen of Cool,” traces her meteoric rise to stardom and the remarkable career trajectory that followed.
Born Betty Joan Persky in 1924, in the Bronx, New York, her parents divorced when she was 8. A star-struck teenager, she was enrolled in Manhattan’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts; she took her mother’s maiden name of Bacal, adding the extra “L” because people constantly mispronounced it.
