Lauren Bacall, the legendary American actress who died Tuesday at 89 after suffering a massive stroke, was born in a family of Jewish immigrants.
Born Betty Joan Perske, "a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx" as she later put it, was born in New York on September 16, 1924, Bacall was the only child of a salesman and a secretary, Jewish immigrants from Poland and Romania who divorced when she was five.
She eventually took her mother's maiden name, Bacal, and modified it slightly when her acting career took off.
She was also the first cousin of former Israeli president Shimon Peres (born Szymon Perski), although they did not meet until they were both famous adults, according to the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.
According to her New York Times obituary, Bacall wrote that she felt “totally Jewish and always would.” However, she wrote that she and her husband Humphrey Bogart, an Episcopalian, had their two children christened in an Episcopal church in deference to Bogart’s concern that “with discrimination still rampant in the world, it would give them one less hurdle to jump in life’s Olympics.”
The Times reported that during her romance with Bogart, Bacall asked him if it mattered to him that she was Jewish. His answer, she wrote, was “Hell, no — what mattered to him was me, how I thought, how I felt, what kind of person I was, not my religion, he couldn’t care less — why did I even ask?”