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Talking to Matt Tyrnauer of ‘Vanity Fair’ in early 2011, Lauren Bacall reflected on her life:

“I think there are certain things you have to face about yourself,” she says. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. Sometimes you think: I’m the Queen of the May—I can do anything. The great thing about life is — the terrible thing about life is — that everything is mixed up. All the things that you thought were one way suddenly turn out to be another way. You might say that my honorary Oscar was a high point in my life, but it actually represents to me the worst thing I’ve ever done. So it’s very weird. But nobody’s perfect, as Joe E. Brown [the actor who had the last word in ‘Some Like It Hot’] said. Right?”

Bacall continued, “I don’t think anybody that has a brain can really be happy. What is there really to be happy about? You tell me. If you’re a thinking human being, there’s no way to divorce yourself from the world. Yes, I probably was happy when I was married to Bogie, but I was very young then. I had a good growing-up life, I would say, but I wasn’t really happy, because I was an only child, and I wasn’t part of a whole family—what we in America consider the proper family, a father and a mother and child, which, of course, is a big crock we know—and yet I had the greatest family anyone could wish for in everyone on my mother’s side. So what you think is happy? Happy shmappy. I think you have to be unconscious to be happy. Are you unconscious?” she asked Tyrnauer.