“The problem with the world is that everyone
is a few drinks behind.”

Humphrey Bogart

Humphrey Bogart may by more known as an influential screen personality than a great actor, he played mostly thuggish gangsters in the 1930s. By the ’40s Bogart had graduated to playing cynical, tough detectives like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and silent, suffering romantics like Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942, with Ingrid Bergman). He won an Oscar for his offbeat role as a drunken boat pilot in The African Queen (1952, with Katharine Hepburn).

Humphrey Bogart was born in New York in 1899 and began his acting career on the stage after military service in World War I, in 1930 he made his first motion picture and was on his way to becoming one of Hollywood’s most prominent leading men of the 1940s and ’50s. He was nominated as Best Actor for his portrayal of Rick Blane, Ingrid Bergman’s rekindled romance, in the Best Picture of 1943, CASABLANCA, but won his first and only Oscar for THE AFRICAN QUEEN with Katharine Hepburn in 1951. He was nominated for a third and final time in 1954 for THE CAINE MUTINY.

Bogart made several prominent films during his career including THE PETRIFIED FOREST (1936) with Bette Davis, and ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (1938), both Warner Bros. crime pictures. Other important achievements included DARK VICTORY (1939) with Bette Davis, HIGH SIERRA (1941) with Ida Lupino, THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) and THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), both directed by John Huston, and SABRINA (1954) with Audrey Hepburn. He also made four noteworthy picture with his last wife, Lauren Bacall: TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT (1944) and THE BIG SLEEP (1946), both directed by Howard Hawks, as well as DARK PASSAGE (1947), and KEY LARGO (1948).

Though she was his fourth wife and 25 years his junior, the marriage to Bacall lasted until his death from cancer in 1957. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter.

The typical Bogart part is diminuendo: he dies 22 times in his 75 films. Bogart’s final tragedy, the cancer of the esophagus that killed him, in 1957, sealed his legend–he maintained the mask of fearlessness as long as he could. If one wants to be a Cary Grant for courtship, a Groucho Marx for wit–one wants to be a Bogart in the face of loss, disease and death. Kenneth Tynan wrote of Bogart onscreen, “He would die with a shrug …no hard feelings.”