Goodbye to Lauren Bacall

When we still hadn´t recovered from the loss of Robin Williams, we had to say goodbye to Lauren Bacall. The news caught us unawares as usually this type of news does but Bacall was 89 years old when she died last week. Lauren Bacall, whose real name was Betty Joan Perske, was one of the icons of Hollywood´s golden age: her career was inextricably linked with the black and white film noir and her image also became a fashion icon.

She worked as a model before starting her acting career and it was then that she caught the attention of the wife of Howard Hawks who hired her for her first film with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not. She had a characteristic way of looking, a commanding appearance and a husky voice which became her most outstanding features and films such as To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo contributed to creating this image of Lauren Bacall as a seductress, a sultry woman who was at the same time strong, independent and insolent. As time went by, Bacall focused her career on stage roles and won two Tony Awards for a comedy and a musical. She received only an Oscar nomination for her portrayal of Barbra Streisand´s mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces but she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. By saying goodbye to Lauren Bacall we say goodbye to a bit of the history of cinema.

 Some of the scenes of her films have become memorable thanks to Lauren Bacall´s way of saying her lines and those scenes have even turned into iconic moments in film history. Are you capable of finding those lines that have been quoted thousands of times?

Robin Williams passes away

Today is a sad day: we´ve learnt that the actor Robin Williams has passed away. The news is totally unexpected: he was only 63 but most of us didn´t know that this wonderful actor had been battling against severe depression for a long time and apparently, the actor committed suicide. However, instead of paying attention to the causes of this loss, we should think of the great performances that he offered us: he was a great comic actor and improvisational talent as a stand-up because he had a gift for comedy but he also excelled at portraying thought-provoking characters like John Keating in Dead Poets Society or Parry in The Fisher King o Dr. Malcom Sayer in Awakenings. He was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar three times and won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1997 film Good Will Hunting.

Robin Williams as the English teacher who inspires and changes the lives of his students in Dead Poets Society.

Not only did Robin Williams win an Oscar for his performance in Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won another one for Best original Screenplay.

Even if I loved the roles in which he departed from the comic parts, I think I´ll always remember him as one of the characters of his comedies, that is, I´ll remember him making us laugh and smile perhaps because as Steve Carell has written in a Tweet today: “Robin Williams made the world a little bit better” and can anyone say anything better than that?

Was Robin Williams one of your favourite actors? What kind of characters do you associate Robin Williams with? What was so special about his way of performing?