Lauren Bacall in "The Mirror Has Two Faces" (1996). Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York, the only child of Natalie ("née" Weinstein; 1901–1977), a secretary who later legally changed her surname to Bacal, and William Perske (1889–1982), who worked in sales. Both her parents were Jewish. According to Bacall, her mother emigrated from Iași, the Kingdom of Romania, through Ellis Island, and her father was born in New Jersey to parents who were born in Valozhyn, a significant center of Jewish life, in present-day Belarus, then in the Russian Empire. Soon after her
1940s in film 1940s in film Hundreds of full-length films were produced during the decade of the 1940s. The great actor Humphrey Bogart made his most memorable films in this decade. Frank Capra's masterpiece "It's a Wonderful Life" and Orson Welles's masterpiece "Citizen Kane" were released. The film noir genre was at its height. Alfred Hitchcock made his American debut with the film "Rebecca", and made many classics throughout the 1940s. The most successful film of the decade was Samuel Goldwyn's "The Best Years of Our Lives"; the film was directed by William Wyler, and starred Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa