Humphrey Bogart

Actor

• Born: December 25, 1899
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: January 14, 1957
• Place of death: Hollywood, California

American actor

Considered by many the greatest male film star of all time, Bogart portrayed memorable film characters and created a career and a persona that resonated decades after his death.

Areas of achievement Film, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Humphrey Bogart (BOH-gahrt) was the only son of Manhattan physician Belmont DeForest Bogart and well-respected magazine illustrator Maude Humphrey. The young Bogart had two younger sisters, Frances and Kay. With well-off parents, Bogart was able to attend Delancy School until fifth grade; then, at age fourteen, he went to New York’s Trinity School. He had to repeat his third year at Trinity after a bout with scarlet fever.

In 1917, Bogart began attending the Phillips Academy, a preparatory school also attended by his father when he was young, in Andover, Massachusetts. Humphrey, however, did not like the school and failed several courses in his first year. His Phillips education was supposed to prepare him to study medicine at Yale University, but his grades did not improve, so he was sent home. His mother told him he was now on his own financially because he had not taken advantage of the many opportunities given him. Not finding a job after several weeks, he joined the U.S. Navy in 1918, the middle of World War I.

Assigned after training to convoy duty aboard the Leviathan, he made more than fifteen Atlantic crossings. Of his time with the Navy, Bogart tells the story of how, during one crossing, a German U-boat shelled the Leviathan and Bogart was hit in the mouth with a piece of wood that pierced his upper lip. Tended by the ship’s doctor, the resulting wound left nerve damage and a partly paralyzed lip that created his distinctive lisp and snarl. Another version of this story, however, is that Bogart’s father, in anger, hit him in the mouth when he was ten years old and damaged a nerve in his upper lip, causing the scar and lisp. Regardless which version is real, Bogart’s lisp and tight-set look gave him the distinctive expression that would one day set him apart from other actors.

Out of the Navy after the signing of the November 11, 1918, armistice, Bogart found work and would have several jobs, including tug inspector for the Pennsylvania Railroad, runner for a Wall Street investment firm, and eventually, office boy for an independent film company, World Films. His friendship with the owner of World Films led to a job as stage manager, which in turn led to minor acting roles. These early roles were mostly panned by critics, but he finally got favorable notice for his part in the hit show Meet the Wife (1923-1924), a comedy with Mary Boland and Clifton Webb.

Young and handsome, Bogart continued to work as both stage manager and actor, playing mostly romantic juvenile parts he would come to call “Tennis, anyone?” roles. Between 1920 and 1926, he worked regularly in the theater. In 1926, he married his first wife, actress Helen Menken. Incompatible on many levels, the couple stayed together only about eighteen months.

By his thirtieth birthday, Bogart’s reputation as a night-clubbing playboy had made him a popular Broadway figure, but he was outgrowing his ability to play the role of a youth. He tried in 1930 for a Hollywood film career, taking a role in a ten-minute short film, Broadway’s Like That, for Fox Studios, but nothing materialized for Bogart after its appearance. He had married his second wife, actress Mary Philips, in 1928, but the geographical separation caused by his relocation to California and her successful career in New York caused their breakup in 1937. Bogart married actress Mayo Methot in 1938, a union lasting until 1945. Characterized by their drinking bouts and very public spats, they were known as the “Battling Bogarts.”

Life’s Work

Bogart’s career as a film actor took off after his performance in the Broadway production of Robert E. Sherwood’s The Petrified Forest (1935). Before this production, he had been under contract with Fox Films and had acted in several films, including A Devil with Women, The Bad Sister, A Holy Terror, Love Affair, Big City Blues, and Three on a Match, in which he played a gangster. No favorable notice came from these film roles. In fact, Fox dropped his contract after sixteen months, believing that his look, the snarl and the lisp, would never appeal to female audiences and that he would consequently never be much of a box-office draw.

However, The Petrified Forest, also starring English actor Leslie Howard, changed everything for Bogart. He received great critical reviews for his work as the menacing Duke Mantee. When Warner Bros. bought the screen rights to the play and wanted Howard to reprise his role, Howard refused to sign on unless Bogart was signed to play Mantee. Warner had wanted its contract player, Edward G. Robinson, for the role, but it wanted Howard more, so Bogart got the part. At age thirty-six, Bogart became “Bogie” and a major motion-picture star for his role in the film version of the hit play, which came out in 1936.

The 1930’s era of G-men and “public enemies” made gangster films popular. Bogart made twenty-nine of them in the four years between The Petrified Forest and High Sierra (1941). He played convicts in nine of these films and was executed in eight. Among the best known are Bullets or Ballots (1936), San Quentin (1937), Dead End (1937), The Roaring Twenties (1939), and They Drive by Night (1940).

A landmark year in Bogart’s career was when he made the critically praised High Sierra and the iconic The Maltese Falcon in 1941, but it was 1942 when he made the film considered by some the best film ever made: Casablanca. Bogart won his first Academy Award nomination for his role as nightclub owner Rick Blaine, but he lost the Oscar to Paul Lukas for his role in Watch on the Rhine. Casablanca won Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay awards, however.

Bogart’s famous Rick Blaine character, a world-weary, urbane, quintessential adventurer, became firmly associated with the actor, defining him in most of his films until his role as a Cockney riverboat captain in The African Queen (1951), which won him his first and only Academy Award.

Of Bogart’s many different films between 1942 and 1951, To Have and Have Not (1944), a dramatization of an Ernest Hemingway novel, is especially significant. During the making of the film he met and worked withLauren Bacall , the smoldering twenty-year-old actress whom he would marry. The couple had two children: son Stephen and daughter Leslie. The Bogart-Bacall marriage became legendary, and Bogart’s life became more domestic. It ended only when Bogart, a longtime smoker, died of throat cancer in 1957.

Bogart and Bacall were among a group of Hollywood actors and directors, including John Huston, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, Paul Henried, John Garfield, Marsha Hunt, and Jane Wyatt, who went to Washington, D.C., in 1947 to protest Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings with the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which were smearing the Hollywood film industry. The couple also actively supported Adlai E. Stevenson in his run for U.S. president in 1952.

Though Bogart’s character in To Have and Have Not was similar to his role as Rick Blaine, he showed unexpected versatility in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), in the comedy We’re No Angels (1955), as a sober businessman in Sabrina (1954), and as a psychopathic ship’s captain in The Caine Mutiny (1954). A semblance of Rick came back in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), and he played a gangster, once again, in The Desperate Hours (1955).

Significance

Forty-two years after his death, the American Film Institute in 1999 named Bogart the greatest male screen legend of all time. He was the model for every cinematic gangster of much of the 1930’s and into the 1950’s. His urbane vulnerability was seen in actors from Edward G. Robinson and George Raft to Steve McQueen.

Bogart’s name is synonymous with not only classic film but also classic acting. His legacy defines the best of Hollywood.

Further Reading

Hyams, Joe. Bogie: The Biography of Humphrey Bogart. New York: New American Library, 1966. A look at the very personal side of Bogart’s life, with anecdotes about friendships and relationships that begin during his youth and touch on his relationship with his parents. Includes many photographs from his childhood, along with film stills.

Porter, Darwin. The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart: The Early Years, 1899-1931. New York: Georgia Literary Association, 2003. Bogart’s Broadway and early Hollywood years are detailed in gossipy tidbits presented in a style that would appeal to Jackie Collins fans. Insights into friendships and romances, with numerous photographs.

Schickel, Richard. Bogie: A Celebration of the Life and Films of Humphrey Bogart. New York: Thomas Dunn Books, 2006. An illustrated commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Bogart’s death in 1957, chronicling his life from childhood through his twenty-plus-year acting career. Reviews of many of his films.