(CNN) -- Lauren Bacall, who died Tuesday at the age of 89, always said, not altogether happily, that she would be defined by her relationship with her husband, the great actor Humphrey Bogart. She was not entirely wrong. It is hard to think of Bacall without thinking of Bogart. When she first arrived on screen in 1944 in "To Have and Have Not," at the ripe old age of 19, the thing that captivated audiences was not her beauty -- there were lots of pretty girls on screen -- so much as her preternatural steeliness. Here was a woman who could stand up to Bogart purring line by purring line, menacing look by menacing look, sneer by sneer, which may be why he wound up falling in love with her in real life. She was not a shrinking violet. She was a Venus flytrap.
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Lauren Bacall, a Hollywood icon, died on Tuesday at the age of 89
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Neal Gabler: She would be defined by her marriage to the great actor Humphrey Bogart
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He says self-possessed Bacall was the perfect noir woman, she had the right attitude
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Gabler: Despite the razor's edge she brought to screen, her persona outlasted its time
Those things made them feral, which is not an adjective anyone would ever have used on the self-contained, self-possessed @placeholder.