American actress Lauren Bacall was BOTD in 1924. Born Betty Perske in Brooklyn, New York City, she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (where she dated her classmate Kirk Douglas), and worked as a fashion model. In 1943, she signed a studio contract with Hollywood director Howard Hawks, who became her Henry Higgins, dressing her stylishly and arranging for vocal lessons to lower and deepen her voice. The following year, she starred in the film noir To Have and Have Not with Humphrey Bogart, catapulting her to instant fame. Bacall and Bogart began an affair during shooting, eventually marrying in 1945. They starred together in The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo, now considered classics of American film noir. Bacall’s air of reserved elegance created a chic, mildly astringent counterpoint to Hollywood bombshells like Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, her co-stars in the musical comedy How to Marry a Millionaire. Her androgynous appeal was well-utilised in the drama Young Man with a Horn, in which she played a closeted lesbian, famously uttering the lines “It must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and know just which door you’re going to walk through.” She also starred in Douglas Sirk’s lurid melodrama Written on the Wind, being romanced simultaneously by Robert Stack and Rock Hudson. After Bogart’s death in 1957, she had a relationship with Frank Sinatra and was briefly married to actor Jason Robards. By the 1970s, her film career dwindled, though she had fun in the murder mystery film Murder on the Orient Express, and won Tony Awards for her Broadway appearances in musicals Applause and Woman of the Year. She had a late-career revival in the 1990s as Barbra Streisand’s diva mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces, winning numerous acting awards and her third Oscar nomination. In 2009, she was awarded an honorary Oscar. She died in 2014, aged 89. Considered one of the greatest stars of Classic Hollywood, she has been an inspiration for lipstick lesbians and drag queens worldwide.