Lauren Bacall a visit to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on February 10, 1945. It was there that Bacall's press agent, chief of publicity at Warner Bros. Charlie Enfield, asked the 20-year-old Bacall to sit on the piano while U.S. Vice President Harry S. Truman played. After "To Have and Have Not", Bacall was seen opposite Charles Boyer in "Confidential Agent" (1945), which was poorly received by critics. By her own estimation, it could have caused considerable damage to her career, had her performance as the mysterious, acid-tongued Vivian Rutledge in Hawks's film noir "The Big Sleep" (1946), co-starring Bogart,
Lauren Bacall film scholars consider "Written on the Wind", directed by Douglas Sirk in 1956, to be a landmark work in the melodrama genre. Appearing with Rock Hudson, Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack, Bacall played a career woman whose life is unexpectedly turned around by a family of oil magnates. Bacall wrote in her autobiography that she did not think much of the role, but reviews were favorable. Wrote "Variety", "Bacall registers strongly as a sensible girl swept into the madness of the oil family". While struggling at home with Bogart's battle with esophageal cancer, Bacall starred with Gregory Peck in "Designing