Concerned about Oscar night's flagging TV ratings, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year decided to remove the awarding of its honorary Oscars from the main event in March in order to devote more time to showcasing the nominated films. So it was at a comparatively low-key event in the Kodak Theatre's Grand Ballroom last Sunday night that Lauren Bacall was given an Oscar in honour of her life's achievements.

Warmly applauded by the likes of Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and her near contemporary, Kirk Douglas, the 85-year-old actress was overwhelmed, and said simply: "I can't believe it."

Though she was nominated once in the mid-1990s, it is, remarkably, her first Oscar. But if the award is intended to honour her life's work in cinema it is, to say the least, overdue and well deserved, because since making her debut in 1944 at the tender age of 20, she has appeared in some of the 20th Century's most memorable films.

Famous for her romance with Humphrey Bogart, she's been Hollywood royalty for almost seven decades, and the dignity with which she has invariably conducted herself could serve as a model to some of today's paparazzi-courting twits. And if luck played a huge part in Bacall's rise to fame, she had the talent and charisma to hang on once she got there.

The child of European-Jewish immigrants, she was born Betty Joan Perske in New York City on September 16, 1924. Her parents separated when she was five: Betty rarely saw her father after, and later took her mother's maiden name, Bacall. Her mother encouraged her interest in the theatre, and as a teenager Betty took acting lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She made a walk-on debut in a Broadway show at the age of 17, but it was her modelling, not her acting, that would be her passport to Hollywood.

At nearly five foot nine, the blonde-haired and high-cheekboned Bacall was a spectacular-looking young woman, and it was a cover shot for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar in 1943 that first got her noticed. The cover was spotted by Howard Hawks' remarkable socialite wife Nancy, who saw potential in Bacall's elegant presence and persuaded her husband to give Betty a screen test for his upcoming film To Have and Have Not.

Hawks was impressed, and promptly signed her up for a seven-year personal contract, after which Nancy Hawks took the 19-year-old under her wing in preparation for her movie debut. She taught her how to dress stylishly, advised her on matters of etiquette, and encouraged her to change her first name to the more movie-star-like Lauren. Nancy also suggested the young actress train herself to speak in a lower tone to make her voice more distinctive.

During screen tests for To Have and Have Not, Bacall was apparently stricken with nerves, and to hide her shaking she started pressing her chin against her chest or shoulder, and tilting her eyes upwards. This accidentally sexy pose became known as 'The Look', and Bacall's debut in the wartime saga attracted huge attention. It also attracted her co-star Humphrey Bogart, who was then not very happily married to actress Mayo Methot.

Bacall was 20, Bogie 45, but neither seemed to care very much about the age gap and they promptly fell in love. They married in 1945, and would remain blissfully happy until Bogart's premature death from throat cancer in 1957. They made three more films together, including Dark Passage (1947) and the John Huston classic Key Largo (1948), but the best of them by far was Howard Hawks' wonderfully complicated detective thriller The Big Sleep (1946).

But her career was hurt by an ill-advised appearance in a dreadful Warner Brothers flop called Confidential Agent (1945), and when she began turning down scripts that did not interest her, she acquired the reputation of being 'difficult'. She struggled, too, to emerge from under the shadow of Bogart, a huge and charismatic star.

She earned favourable reviews for her appearance opposite Kirk Douglas in Michael Curtiz's Young Man with a Horn (1950). And in 1953 she scored what was probably her single biggest hit in the comic musical How to Marry a Millionaire, which co-starred Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe. Bacall was excellent as the wise-cracking gold-digger Schatze Page, and even made a joke about "that old fella, what's-his-name, in The African Queen".

But Bacall had little time for Hollywood nonsense, and in her 1978 autobiography, By Myself, she relates how she refused to press her hand and footprints into the cement outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre at the premiere of How to Marry a Millionaire. She was too strong and too sassy for some movie producer's tastes, and as the 1950s wore on her film career began to suffer.

This was partly because she had young children and, unlike some other stars, took the role of motherhood seriously. And she spent several years devotedly nursing Bogart after he was diagnosed with cancer. He died on January 14, 1957, a few weeks after his 57th birthday. Bacall was devastated.

Although her film career dried up somewhat in the 1960s, Bacall reinvented herself with a string of Tony Award-winning appearances on the Broadway stage. She also remarried, but her union with the brilliant and charming but alcoholic actor Jason Robards was over by 1969.

In 1976, she appeared with John Wayne in his last film, The Shootist, and though the two had sharply divergent political views (Wayne was a right-wing Republican, Bacall a dyed-in-the-wool liberal), they became friends.

In the 1980s, she appeared in Robert Altman's Health, and had smaller roles in films like Misery and Dinner at Eight. In 1996, she delivered a memorably salty performance in Barbra Streisand's otherwise unremarkable romantic comedy The Mirror Has Two Faces. She won a Golden Globe, and was widely tipped to win best supporting actress at the 1997 Oscars, but was pipped by Juliette Binoche for The English Patient.

If Binoche's gushing acceptance speech was unseemly, Bacall's response to the whole thing was dignity personified. She had seen and done too much in her long and remarkable life to be bothered about a little golden statue.

At 85, she's still acting, as strong performances in recent films like Lars von Trier's Dogville attest. "I'm still working," she has said, "I've never stopped, and while my health holds out I never will."

pwhitington@independent.ie

- Paul Whitington

Irish Independent