Think again.
Since her award-winning (though Oscar-snubbed) supporting turn in Barbra Streisand's The Mirror Has Two Faces, legendary film diva Lauren Bacall has starred in exactly zero movies. Her only acting in two-plus years: a two-part episode of Chicago Hope that begins tonight.
She hasn't "had a decent offer of a movie," she grouses in the Los Angeles Times. "They are not writing wonderful parts for women. That is the sad truth. They were certainly not breaking down the doors for me, anyway."
Of course, despite being a highly regarded actress, Bacall is notorious for turning down gigs. As a contract player at Warners in the '50s, she was suspended a dozen times for refusing roles.
Bacall tells the Times that she has been offered several guest parts on TV series, but the only one she has done subsequent to Chicago Hope was on pal James Garner's Rockford Files.
Seems she's equally choosy when it comes to tube roles. "Television--some of it has become awfully arrogant," she says. "They don't offer you much, and there's no point in that kind of exposure unless, first of all, you're paid well, and, second of all, it's really good material. I mean good material comes before anything."
Bacall is best known for appearing opposite first hubby Humphrey Bogart in such films as To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage and Key Largo. She also starred in Murder on the Orient Express, The Shootist and The Fan, and is an accomplished stage actress, winning Tonys for Applause and Woman of the Year. She received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1997 for her body of work.
Last year she also picked up Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe trophies for her Mirror role, but lost out in an upset to The English Patient's Juliette Binoche at the Oscars.
Still, in spite of all the accolades, Bacall claims her big-screen career never really blossomed. "I was never given the opportunity to have any variety," she tells the Times. "I don't think I've ever been taken particularly seriously in movies by movie makers. I don't know why."