Humphrey Bogart

Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on December 25, 1899, in Manhattan, New York City, the eldest child of Belmont DeForest Bogart, a cardiopulmonary surgeon, and Maud Humphrey, a commercial illustrator and art director. He had two younger sisters, Frances and Catherine Elizabeth. The family maintained an Upper West Side apartment as well as a cottage on a 55-acre estate on Canandaigua Lake in upstate New York. Bogart attended the Delancey School, then Trinity School, and later Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, which he left in 1918 after one semester, having failed four of six classes.

Bogart began his professional career on the Broadway stage, appearing in productions between 1922 and 1935. His New York stage credits included Swifty, Hell's Bells, Cradle Snatchers, Meet the Wife, and The Petrified Forest, among other productions. His portrayal of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest earned him praise and helped establish his reputation as a performer capable of commanding dramatic roles.

He made his film debut in The Dancing Town in 1928 and spent more than a decade in supporting roles, frequently cast as gangsters. His performance as Hugh "Baby Face" Martin in William Wyler's Dead End in 1937 drew positive critical attention. The turning point in his film career came with High Sierra in 1941, followed immediately by his lead role as Sam Spade in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, widely regarded as one of the first great noir films. Bogart's portrayals of private detectives Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, the latter appearing in The Big Sleep in 1946, became defining models for the noir detective figure.

His first romantic lead role came in Casablanca in 1942, in which he played Rick Blaine opposite Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa Lund. The American Film Institute later ranked Blaine as the fourth greatest hero in American cinema and identified the Blaine-Lund romance as the greatest love story in American cinema. Casablanca itself ranked second on the American Film Institute's 1998 list of the greatest American films. During the production of To Have and Have Not in 1944, Bogart, then 44, began a relationship with his 19-year-old co-star Lauren Bacall. He divorced his third wife in 1945 and married Bacall shortly thereafter. The two subsequently appeared together in Dark Passage in 1947 and Key Largo in 1948.

Additional notable performances included his roles in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948 and Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place in 1950, both later considered among his finest work. In 1947 he played a war hero navigating a murder investigation in Dead Reckoning, co-starring Lizabeth Scott. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of a cantankerous river launch skipper opposite Katharine Hepburn in the World War I adventure The African Queen in 1951. The Caine Mutiny in 1954, in which he played a World War II naval commander, earned him a third Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. That same year he appeared in The Barefoot Contessa with Ava Gardner and in Sabrina alongside William Holden and Audrey Hepburn. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Bogart the greatest male star of classic American cinema. He died on January 14, 1957, from esophageal cancer.