TWENTY-FIVE minutes on the phone with Lauren Bacall leaves you with the overwhelming urge to be a certain sort of woman.

Or to be with a certain sort of woman keeping the company of a certain sort of woman.

The sort who speaks in italics and laughs lustily at her own jokes, who can make a word like 'canasta' sound regal. Who could level a flock of world leaders with a good, long stare. Who, at 83, still elicits wishful sighs from men half a century her junior.

Who is brassy and bold and the embodiment of that particular brand of deliberate, vintage femininity now all but obsolete.

Go ahead, say it: They don't make 'em like that anymore.

'Re-TIRE-ment!' Bacall gasps with disdain. 'God, no! Why would I RETIRE? As long as I can walk and talk. Hell, no. I'm totally against retirement. I don't believe in it.

'Why would you stop?' she scoffs.

'Just to go to lunch? Drink?' And then that throaty laugh is unleashed. You imagine her head back, eyes closed, and you laugh, too.

The Christmas lights have just gone up, and Humphrey Bogart's widow is on the phone from her Upper West Side abode with current love, Sophie - 'my papillon, most DIVINE creature on Earth' - curled in her lap.

The Walker, a Washington society thriller and the latest project to spare her the insufferable banality of retirement, is the occasion for the conversation.

In it, she plays Natalie Van Miter, one of three D.C. socialites who meet at a private club for a weekly card game with Carter Page III (Woody Harrelson), a cheeky gay man who regularly escorts the women to black-tie events when their husbands are too busy to be bothered. Then a murder disrupts their well-ordered lives and threatens to blow apart the persona Page has so carefully constructed for himself.

Bacall, who never lived in Washington but has 'known MANY a senator and congressman', says that after reading the script by Paul Schrader (American Gigolo), she 'could almost see crowds in private homes in Washington'.

'It was, I thought, very subtly done,' she concludes. 'Also, I just love my character. I love the idea of being in control and observing everyone else, because I knew what the score was and I knew who was doing what to whom or with whom. And she had humour - which to me is one of the great traits on Earth.'

Bacall sounds exactly as you'd expect her to sound: husky and quick, just as she did at 63 and 43 and 23. Though not, if legend is to be believed, as she sounded at 18, before a Hollywood producer told the young beauty she'd never make it in his industry with that high, nasally voice of hers.

She trained for two weeks and came back to him with the purr that became her trademark.

And at 19, she was cast in To Have And Have Not, the movie that introduced her to Bogart, her husband of nearly 12 years, and set her on a career that now spans more than 60 years.

Could she ever have imagined? 'God, I was so lucky. I was so lucky at that age, you know. My God. It gave me a life - and everything,' she says. 'But I never think in terms of longevity. I never thought I would actually live this long... but I intend to hang around as long as I can, you understand. I mean, considering the alternative - what the hell?'

The parts now are not quite what one might hope for a living legend still practising her craft. ('No. There are NOT plenty of good roles,' she says, seething.) But she'd rather be working in an imperfect part than not working at all.

'I LOVE my profession. I love the challenge of it, I love the interest of it. And sometimes the no good of it and sometimes the terrific of it,' she explains.

But if you really want to know, Bacall will tell you there used to be a good deal more of the terrific. And it's harder now, she thinks, to be a woman of a certain age.

'Considering the fact that they don't write parts for women anymore, the fact that I work at all is a miracle,' she says. 'When Tennessee Williams was alive, there was excitement for women. WONNN-derful stuff. Well, you know, you don't GET that kind of thing anymore.'

And maybe the eager little darlings working today don't deserve that kind of thing, anyway.

'So many of the young people today say, 'Oh, I want to be an actress.' No! They DON'T want to be an actress. They don't want to learn their craft. They want to be STARS,' she scoffs. 'I mean, it's all so vapid.'

But never mind all that. Bacall would like to talk politics.

And news and the war and what's going on in the world. And if you happen to need an opinion about what's going on in the world, well, she's your gal. ('But don't get me started. My blood pressure goes up,' she says.) The point is, she's still at it - all of it. The friends and the family and the learning and the 'taking as many vitamins as I can to stay alive'. And the career, of course, the glorious CAREER.

So, is there a next gig lined up? 'I wish,' she says, like a slingshot. 'I'm open for business all the time.' And Bacall knows the business will come.

'My life is okay,' she says, laughing. 'As long as I'm living.'