#john engstead

Gregory Peck, April 5, 1916 - June 12, 2003.

Lauren Bacall by John Engstead, c.1946

"I first met Lauren Bacall in 1964 on the opening night of Funny Girl. I was dazzled by her style and beauty.. and that voice. It was an impression constantly reconfirmed as I watched her and enjoyed her work over the years, her originality and class evident in how she conducted her career and her life. It was, finally, my great privilege to have directed her in The Mirror Has Two Faces for which she won the Golden Globe as Best Supporting Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award in that category. Her innate aesthetic taste was evident in everything she did and in what and whom she treasured."

Portrait of singer Nat King Cole and singer Barbara McNair. Label on back: "CBS Television Network. Stamped on back: "Photograph by John Engstead, Beverly Hills." Handwritten on back: "Barbara McNair and Nat King Cole in 'I'm with you.'"

“Ava Gardner used to be known as the most beautiful woman in the world (and was once fancifully publicized as the World’s Most Beautiful Animal), but it was not wholly her looks that made her one of the great movie stars. Her image, which she quickly developed, was that of the independent-minded, worldly-wise and sexually knowledgeable good bad woman who fascinates men and worries wives. She was eminently suitable to be a Hemingway heroine, as she proved in The Sun Also Rises and The Snows of Kilimanjaro, and her highly publicized off-screen life was built into her screen personality. Joseph Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa appears almost autobiographical (sensual, temperamental beauty built to stardom) and certainly he never considered anybody else for the part. Her marriages to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, like her friendships with Howard Hughes and others, are all a part of her cinema legend; she is the epitome of the girl from the wrong side of the tracks who has made it big without kowtowing to anybody.”

/ From The Illustrated Encyclopedia of The World’s Great Movie Stars (1979) by Ken Wlaschin /