Want to know the best Lauren Bacall movies? How about the worst Lauren Bacall movies? Curious about Lauren Bacall’s box office grosses or which Lauren Bacall movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Lauren Bacall movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which ones got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place…. because we have all of that information and much more.
Lauren Bacall (1924-2014) was an American actress, who the American Film Institute ranked as one of the Top 50 Screen Legends of all time. Bacall is ranked as the 20th best actress, right behind #19 Rita Hayworth and right before #21 Sophia Loren. One of our goals is to do a movie page on all 50 Screen Legends. After completing this page we have now written movie pages on 43 (or 86%) of those performers……leaving only 5 actresses and 2 actors that still need movie pages.
Personal drivel part: Recently the family and I went on vacation to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. While staying at our way over priced hotel, I figured I would use their printer and their ink to print up all the IMDb pages on the remaining AFI stars that still needed pages. As I went through their IMDb pages I started to realize that doing a Lauren Bacall page was going to actually be pretty easy to do. Of the 36 movies I was going to have to research….31 were already in my database….or 86.11% of her movies. All I had to do was assign the movies to Lauren Bacall. So when we got home, I quickly researched the final movies and the Bacall page was ready to be published. FYI Buster Keaton, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish are going to be a serious pain in the ass to do.
Her IMDb page shows 71 acting credits from 1944-2012. This page will rank 36 Lauren Bacall movies from Best to Worst in seven different sortable columns of information. Uncredited roles, bit parts, shorts, television appearances and movies not released in theaters in North America were not included in the rankings.
Lauren Bacall Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Lauren Bacall Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Lauren Bacall movies by co-stars of her movies
- Sort Lauren Bacall movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
- Sort Lauren Bacall movies by domestic yearly box office rank
- Sort Lauren Bacall movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and Oscar® wins each Lauren Bacall movie received.
- Sort Lauren Bacall movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
- Use the sort and search buttons to make this table very interactive. For example…if you type in “Humphrey Bogart” in the search box….the 4 Bogart/Bacall movies will pop right up.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Lauren Bacall Table
- Eleven Lauren Bacall movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 30.55% of her movies listed. How To Marry A Millionaire (1953) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Lauren Bacall movie grosses $81.50 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 23 of Lauren Bacall’s movies are rated as good movies…or 63.88% of her movies. The Big Sleep (1946) was her highest rated movie while Ready to Wear (1994) was her lowest rated movie.
- Ten Lauren Bacall movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 27.77% of her movies.
- Five Lauren Bacall movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 13.88% of her movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 39.86. 19 Lauren Bacall movies scored higher that average….or 54.28% of her movies. To Have and Have Not (1944) got the the highest UMR Movie Score while Diamonds (1999) got the lowest UMR Movie Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Lauren Bacall
1. Betty Joan Perske was born on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York
2. In the early 1940s…. legendary director, Howard Hawks, signed her to a seven-year contract and began to manage her career. Hawks changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose “Bacall”, a variant of her mother’s maiden name.
3. “If you want me just whistle. You know how to whistle don’t you? Just put your lips together and blow.”..Bacall’s line from 1944’s To Have and Have Not is one of the greatest movie quotes of all-time.
4. Lauren Bacall was married two times in her life. Her first marriage was to actor Humphrey Bogart from 1945 to his death in 1957. Her second marriage was to actor Jason Robards from 1961-1969. She and Bogart had boy and a girl…..she and Robards had a boy.
5. All three of Lauren Bacall’s children became actors. Sam Robards appeared in American Beauty, Fandango (one of my favorite forgotten movies) and many televison series. Stephen Bogart has 14 IMDb credits and Leslie Bogart has 2 IMDb credits.
6. Lauren Bacall put a whistle in Humphrey Bogart’s coffin. It was a reference to the famous line she says to him in their first film together To Have and Have Not (1944): “You know how to whistle, don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow.”. She was Bogart’s widow for an incredible 57 years!
7. According to the American Film Institute, Lauren Bacall is the 20th greatest female star of all-time.
8. Lauren Bacall was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar® in 1996’s The Mirror Has Two Faces. She won the Golden Globe® Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Mirror Has Two Faces. In 2010, Bacall received a Honorary Oscar®…”In recognition of her central place in the Golden Age of motion pictures”.
9. Along with Veronica Lake, Julie London and Rita Hayworth, Bacall was one of four inspirations that helped compose the character Jessica Rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988).
10. Check out Lauren Bacall’s movie career compared to current and classic stars on our Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time page.
1 Barry Norman is a (probably retired) journalist and film critic who was very fashionable on TV over here in the late seventies and early eighties because of his TV series The Hollywood Greats which examined the careers and lives of a number of the great stars of the Hollywood Classic Era with each selected star being allocated a self-contained episode of around 1 hour.
2 A few years ago Barry gave an interview in which he said that the attribute ‘Legend’ was very overworked nowadays with many celebrities being given undeserved credit for being one. Referring to the AFI Screen Legends lists he said that for example Gable, Bogie, Brando, Monroe, Bette Davis and Clint Eastwood were all legends but he was emphatic that Lauren Bacall was NOT.
3 Certainly Lauren’s box office stats are not vertiginous; she was the top star in very few of her movies; the most noted classics in which she was the leading lady were probably the Bogart ones; I cannot find her name in Quigley; and it cannot be ruled out that minus her association with Bogie her fame would have been limited.
4 However whilst the extent of screen success is very important to a movie star being alive in the real world is naturally even more so and in that respect Betty is certainly one of the all time big winners in movies as she was almost 90 when she died and she kept contributing to movies until she was 88 and TV until the year of her death (2014) by which time many of her contemporaries over whom Barry Norman raved had long since departed this world.
5 Within that context a further consolation for Betty’s fans is that even if Norman had considered her a legend she would never have been given one of his Hollywood Greats
episodes because his subjects had all passed away though I cannot recall whether it was ever SPECIFICALLY stated that death was a criterion for an episode in his programmes. Anyway Betty outlived even Norman’s programmes about The Hollywood Greats by some 30 years so she certainly had the last word!
CLARIFICATION
1 Because his career did not begin until 1955 Clint did not make the AFI list but Barry Norman considered that a technicality and opined that Clint was around long enough to be considered a Legend on the basis of his great achievements.
2 Norman predicted that in the future when they had been around a bit longer the likes of Hanks, Cruise and possibly Travolta would be classed as legends.
BOB
Hey Bob….I think Norman made a good point….but Clint, Hanks and Cruise made the UMR Top 25 stars of 1950-2010…..so they always have that….lol. Sorry Travolta did not make the cut. Thanks for the clarification.
Hey Bob….gotta admit…I have to agree with Barry Norman. Bacall might be the weakest AFI Screen Legend of the 25 actresses…..not to say that I do not like here…….but to me…she was a supporting actress….versus a leading lady. Even her Bogart movies…her roles were secondary to Bogart…and 3rd or 4th in Key Largo. To me she falls into the “celebrity” status versus “movie star” status.
As for Quigley…she never even reached a Top 25 ranking in any year….so you are not missing her at all in your Quigley search. I agree that she was Hollywood royalty….I always liked that up until her passing….that Bogart’s widow was still around …and somewhat strange that I found it a comforting fact. I was sad when she passed….because yet another door to Hollywood’s Golden Era was closed.
I might not know much….but for lasting impact…Bacall easily outdistances Norman. Thanks for your thoughts on Lauren Bacall.
BRUCE
1 Thanks for confirming Bacall’s Quigley situation as when you get into your 70s you’re never confident that the old eyes – not to mention the mind ! – are not letting you down.
2 I think you have summed up Lauren’s status in a precise nutshell – largely a supporting actress who became a famous celebrity rather than a great movie star.
BOB
Hey Bob….the power of the “control F” function….just hold those two buttons down…and up pops a search task…and all you have to do is type in the word you are looking for….and it does all the work for you. Makes it easier on the mind and the eyes. Glad you like the way I summed up Ms. Bacall…..which does not mean I did not like her….as I actually really did. 🙂
TCM is airing a birthday tribute to Lauren Bacall including Designing Woman. She is one of my all time favourites.
I created a Favourite Top 10 list on Letterboxd:
https://letterboxd.com/florar/list/favourite-lauren-bacall-movies/
Hey Flora….very cool…..glad to see you enjoying Letterboxd.com so much. Don’t forget who told you about that website…lol.
Hey Flora…thanks …Designing Woman has been on my list for awhile…I will see if I can check it out.
It’s a fun film. Greg got to show his real life comedic nature. And yes-
Thanks for telling me about letterboxd.
Hey Flora…thanks for the mini-review on the movie….sadly I missed it yet again…..one day I will check it out.
This article acivehed exactly what I wanted it to achieve.
Hey Lorrie. Glad my Lauren Bacll page was what you were looking. Lots of hard to find stats and figures in this one. Thanks for stopping by and leaving such a nice compliment.
I saw Woman’s World recently for the first time as part of TCM’s Star of the Month look at Fred MacMurray. It is a wonderful drama about corporate America and how wives are part of a man’s success in big business. Three couples…Lauren is Fred’s wife. Quite often, I watch movies even for the first time and can guess how it ends because of similar movies about the same subject, even if it is not a remake of an earlier movie. This was not the case. I wasn’t sure how it would end until the film was almost finished. Well worth seeing.
Flora
Hey Flora. Glad you enjoyed Woman’s World. Seems I have been running into lots of Fred MacMurray movies these days as I research movie subjects. I have been working on Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert for a very long time….Fred has a combined 10 movies with those two actresses.
I know what you mean about knowing where movies are going….and when a movie does something unexpected it makes the movie better. Thanks for the mini-review of Woman’s World.
Here I am at last!!! I enjoyed Lauren Bacall as an actress. I especially liked her in Written In The Wind with Rock Hudson and Robert Stack. That was a good movie. I have seen it many times. Her roles with Humphrey Bogart were very good too. It was unfortunate that they only had 12 years together. Thanks again for a great site. I will try not to fall behind again….
Hey BERN1960….better late than never. Written of the Wind is a good one….though I think Dorothy M….took all of Bacall’s glory in that movie. Yep her and Bogie had 12 years together…and then she was his widow for 45 more years. As always…thanks for stopping by and commenting.