If you ask Lauren Bacall, it’s not wise to dwell on the past. “No. Let’s deal with now,” she says huskily. “The old days were great, but they don’t exist any more. So why upset myself thinking about them?” It would take a brave man indeed to upset Ms Bacall. Gloriously self-assured after a lifetime of being the most fêted woman in the room, she’s bitingly funny and capable of barking out orders like a drill sergeant or a grande dame, which is now exactly what she is. “Could you not do this here,” she commands a waiter who is attempting, nervously, to serve us refreshments in her Berlin hotel suite. “You are interrupting the conversation.”

But, in truth, it doesn’t take much to get her talking about the past, and at 82, her recall of those “old days” from, say, the Forties and Fifties, is razor-sharp and her descriptions of the people who shared them with her are vivid, even though most are sadly long gone. There were husbands – Bogey and Jason, she calls them; that’s Humphrey Bogart and Jason Robards to you and me. And there were “dear friends” like Noël (Coward), Gregory (Peck) and Niven, as in David. “I met these people because I was married to a man 25 years my senior,” she says. “I met all of Bogey’s generation. Bogey and Noël were great friends. Noël could do everything – write, direct, act, cabaret. And he had such wit. On the opening night of Applause, he sent me a note, ‘Don’t be nervous, darling, but it all depends on you.’”

There are, of course, new friends and admirers. She worked with Nicole Kidman in Birth and Dogville, although a few years ago Bacall famously dismissed the Australian as a “beginner” after an interviewer had referred to her as a legend. “She can’t be a legend at whatever age she is,” Bacall snapped at the time, and if this caused any friction, no one’s told her. “Nicole is great,” she declares. “I love her and we’ve become great friends. She’s marvellous, intelligent.”

She continues to work, although there isn’t as much of it on offer as she would like. Next, she’ll be seen in Paul Schrader’s The Walker, playing a socialite who, along with other wealthy widows and wives of the rich and powerful, is escorted by Carter Page III, a gay confidant – played superbly by Woody Harrelson – through the upper echelons of Washington DC’s social scene.

According to Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver and directed, among other films, American Gigolo), the term “walker” was first used to describe Jerry Zipkin, who stepped out – in the platonic sense – with Nancy Reagan and socialite Betsy Bloomingdale. “I used to know Jerry Zipkin,” says Bacall. “He was a very funny, gossipy man, a great escort. I was not one of the women he escorted, but I do know women that he did. But that’s not my life, I’m not like that.”

Bacall still finds acting as satisfying as ever. But she gets short-tempered about some of the fuss that surrounds it. “I love my profession. I have tremendous respect for it. What I don’t have respect for is the red carpet and the celebrity scene. It’s become a zoo. It’s so stupid. They ask you stupid questions [putting on a high-pitched girlie voice]: ‘What are you wearing?’ Oh, Christ almighty!”

This outburst may have something to do with the fact that the previous night she was required to brave the red carpet at the premiere of The Walker at the Berlin Film Festival, having arrived from her home in New York earlier that day. “I’m exhausted,” she says, entering the room with her dog, a brown and white papillon called Sophie. “I’m going to pinch myself to see if I’m still alive…”

She is facing up to the facts of life for most octogenarians – that there’s an awful lot of death around when you get to that age. She’s lost both husbands and most of those older “dear friends” (Katharine Hepburn, Frank Sinatra), and it doesn’t get any easier. Earlier at a press conference, a German journalist had asked her if she thought about death, and she had looked him up and down before saying: “You’re a cheerful fellow, aren’t you? Considering how close I am, don’t you think that’s a bit much?” A few minutes later, she was talking about her earlier work and mentioned an Agatha Christie adaptation. She looked the unfortunate journalist in the eye and quipped: “It was called Appointment With Death. There. Just for you…”

Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske to Jewish immigrants in New York City. (Surprisingly, her first cousin is Israel’s president, Shimon Peres.) “If you are Jewish, you always feel Jewish,” Bacall explains, “whatever that means. But my mother was not religious – although my grandmother was. She lit a candle every Friday night for her dead husband, although she probably wore him out anyway. She was the strong one. She loved Kirk Douglas when I brought him to the apartment because he was a nice Jewish boy.”

As a child, she wanted to dance, but at 15 won a place at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Modelling work followed, after stints as a cinema usherette, but at 19 she got the kind of lucky break that Hollywood legends are made of when, in 1944, director Howard Hawks’s wife, Slim, saw her on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and showed him the picture. Hawks promptly called her in for an audition and cast her in To Have and Have Not opposite Humphrey Bogart, who was already a huge star.

Before Bacall met Bogart, she assumed – presumably because of his numerous tough-guy roles – that he would be uncouth. “People surprise you. Bogey was an avid reader.I thought he was one of those ‘deez, dem and doze’ guys. I didn’t know his father was a doctor and his mother was an artist. I thought, ‘Ugh, lordy!’, but he spoke well and was well read.”

By midway through the shoot, they were in the throes of a full-blown affair. “Somewhere there must have been a spark,” she recalls, “because we were fooling and joking and that always leads to trouble.” She was just 19 and he was 44. When filming finished, Bogart broke the news to his wife, and within 18 months he had married Bacall. “Certainly Bogey was the most gigantic influence on me in the most positive way and I was very, very lucky to have been so moulded as a teenager by this older man who was younger than I was in many ways. He had incredible energy – he had more energy then I did at 19. He was physically able to do more.”

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