You don’t come across many people who embody the golden age of Hollywood more than Lauren Bacall. In the 1970’s and 80’s Bacall became an extremely popular figure on the chat show circuit, both in American and the UK, and some of of the career highlights of people like Parkinson, Wogan, and Aspel, came when sitting next to this legend of the silver screen. But none of them really came close to the onscreen relationship between Bacall and pioneering Welsh broadcaster and writer Mavis Nicholson. Nicholson was perhaps the finest interviewer of her generation, and perhaps true recognition of her art has been unfairly overshadowed in a medium dominated by men with sideburns and big ties. But when at her best, Nicholson outshone them all, and her archive of interviews show a thoughtful and compassionate intellectual who treated the craft of interviewing with the attention to detail certainly missing nowadays.
Here we show the full 25 minutes of Nicholson’s chat – for it does come across as a chat between friends, a catch-up, rather than an interview in front of cameras – with Bacall. It is arguably Nicholson’s finest half hour, and Lauren Bacall was never so open and relaxed.