The sultry upward gaze known as The Look was born when a terrified 19-year-old pressed her chin to her chest to stop it from quivering during a screen test. This episode follows Lauren Bacall from her birth as Betty Joan Perske in the Bronx in 1924, the daughter of Jewish immigrants and a second cousin of Shimon Peres, through her parents’ divorce, her work as a theater usher and model, and the 1943 Harper’s Bazaar cover that reached Slim Keith and her husband, director Howard Hawks. A secretary’s misunderstanding sent her a train ticket to Hollywood, where Hawks signed her at $100 a week, renamed her, and had her shout Shakespeare in canyons to lower her voice.

We cover her debut opposite Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not, the flop of Confidential Agent, her noir run in The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo, her refusal to leave handprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and her risky trip to Washington with the Committee for the First Amendment. We then trace Bogart’s death in 1957, the Frank Sinatra episode, her turbulent marriage to Jason Robards, and her pivot to Broadway, where she won Tony Awards for Applause and Woman of the Year and earned Bette Davis’s blessing. Her later chapters include Misery, an Oscar nomination for The Mirror Has Two Faces at 72, Dogville, Howl’s Moving Castle, a Sopranos cameo, and an honorary Academy Award in 2009.

• How a fashion magazine cover and a clerical mix-up launched a Hollywood career
• Why Bacall rebuilt her own voice and turned fear into a signature trademark
• Her reputation for being difficult and her refusal of Hollywood honors she felt she had not earned
• Widowhood at 32, Broadway conquest, and Bette Davis’s backstage verdict
• Her late-career range from Stephen King to Lars von Trier to The Sopranos