Legendary actress Lauren Bacall, an icon of Hollywood’s golden age who lit up the silver screen in a series of classic movies opposite her husband Humphrey Bogart, has died aged 89.

“With deep sorrow, yet with great gratitude for her amazing life, we confirm the passing of Lauren Bacall,” the Bogart estate confirmed in a brief statement on Twitter on Tuesday.

US media reports said Bacall had died after suffering a massive stroke at her home in New York on Tuesday morning.

Born Betty Joan Perske – “a nice Jewish girl from the Bronx,” as she later put it – Bacall electrified Hollywood in her 1944 screen debut To Have and Have Not, when she famously met Bogart and “taught him how to whistle”.

She was just 20.

With her smouldering gaze and deep, husky voice, she soon became a hot property both in Hollywood and on Broadway.

Bacall spent much of the rest of her life coming to terms with her early superstardom, which grew into a seven-decade screen and stage career.

Beginning in the golden age of Hollywood, it would include wartime dramas and film noir with Bogart, action movies with John Wayne, a romance picture with Gregory Peck and a comedy with Marilyn Monroe.

She cemented her sultry bombshell status in To Have and Have Not, when she cooed to Harry ‘Steve’ Morgan, played by a smitten Bogart: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

The line gave her instant silver-screen immortality, and the American Film Institute pronounced it the 34th greatest movie quote of all time.

When Bogart died from throat cancer in 1957, Bacall placed a whistle in his coffin.