Thirst for Moore
COLLECTING: The star-struck star. John Vincent reports on a Hollywood legend’s admiration for a Yorkshire sculptor.
HE was born Betty Joan Perske – but the world knows her best as Lauren Bacall. Her mesmeric, sultry beauty and husky growl transformed her into one of the great movie icons of the golden age of cinema from the moment she made her dramatic debut as ‘Slim’ Browning in the 1944 film To Have and Have Not.
Audiences were hooked long before her electric scene with fishing boat captain Harry ‘Steve’ Morgan – played by her soon-to-be real-life husband Humphrey Bogart – in which she tells him: “You don’t have to say anything, you don’t have to do anything. Maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”
Bacall went on to appear in three more films with Bogart, The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947) and Key Largo (1948), as well as many other movies including How To Marry a Millionaire (1953), Northwest Frontier (1959), Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and The Shootist (1976).
One thing you may be surprised to learn is that she was a big fan – and friend – of sculptor Henry Moore and following her death earlier this year aged 89, eight of his pieces are included in sales of her possessions at Bonhams in New York.
Two bronzes go under the hammer on Tuesday – Working Model for Reclining Figure: Bone Skirt, estimated to fetch the equivalent of £372,000-£497,000, cast shortly after actress and artist first met in the mid-70s, and the tiny Maquette for Mother and Child: Arms, cast in the same year and listed at £93,000-£124,000. Six other works by the Yorkshire sculptor – all of which adorned the drawing room of her last home overlooking Central Park in New York – are to be sold by Bonhams in March.
Bacall’s admiration for Moore began in the 1950s when she started buying his lithographs but it was not until 1975