Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * There is a lot to talk about -- the famous story of how a teenaged model from New York City came to Hollywood in 1931 and ended up co-starring with Humphrey Bogart, becoming his wife, and later, after his death, marrying another legendary actor, Jason Robards; her movies with leading men like Charles Boyer, Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum and others; her award-winning stage appearances in musicals like Applause! and Woman of the Year. But Bacall won't go down that road.
"I'll tell you one thing, just between us, I'm so sick of talking about myself," she says. "All of these years I've talked about myself." This doesn't bode well for a story about Lauren Bacall, but part of the reason she doesn't want to talk about the past is that she's still looking ahead, not back.
She is in Toronto with The Walker, a drama from Paul Schrader about a group of powerful women in Washington, D.C., who gather around a gay socialite, played by Woody Harrelson.
Bacall plays Natalie Van Miter, a wise Washington wife. "I read it and liked it immediately: liked the part, liked the setting . .
. And I love to work. Work is what keeps me going.
" She describes the Natalie character in terms that sound as if they could apply to Bacall herself. "She's just a woman who has been living life for so many years, and is a widow obviously, and has seen everything and done everything as far as Washington is concerned. She just watches and sees the way people behave and watches their marriages fall apart and who's sleeping with whom and all that kind of fabulous stuff.
" For the past seven years, Bacall has been working in the world of independent cinema with the likes of Lars von Trier (Dogville and Manderlay). "I'm into learning and I'm very much into being an actor," Bacall says. "You're working with new people all the time and so you're learning new methods.
When I worked with Lars von Trier I had to forget everything I'd been taught being in movies and learn a while new way of approaching a part or doing a scene. That's fun for me." That also applies to a famous recent appearance on the TV program The Sopranos, in which she played a movie star who utters a very naughty word.
"I remember when they first sent me the script, my son who was visiting me at the time said, 'Oh you have to do this.' Of course I had to do it. Anything with The Sopranos, to be part of that, I'd accept in two seconds, it was so great.
" Bacall says the key to a long career is to stay interested. People who can't do that might as well cut their throats, "and it's the only throat I have. I don't want to cut it.
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