In 1999, the American Film Institute named Humphrey Bogart as the greatest male star of American cinema. And with leading roles in classics such as The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Key Largo, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen, Sabrina, The Caine Mutiny, and, of course, Casablanca, it’s pretty hard to argue with them.
So today, we’ll take a look at the life and career of Humphrey Bogart: his successes, his failures, his trials and tribulations. See how a guy who only got into acting for the money became one of Hollywood’s most enduring legends.
Early Years
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born in New York City on Christmas Day, December 25, 1899, although some places mention his birthday as January 23. Apparently, this confusion was created by Warner Bros., which changed Bogart’s birthday on publicity materials during the 1930s. Many other sources followed suit, and January 23 became Bogart’s new official birthday. However, his school and Navy records both list him as being born on December 25, and his wife, Lauren Bacall, insisted that the family always celebrated his birthday on Christmas Day.
Anyway, Humphrey Bogart was the eldest of three children to Belmont DeForest Bogart and Maud Humphrey. To put it simply, Bogie was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Both his parents came from affluent backgrounds and were successful individuals in their own right. His father was a cardiopulmonary surgeon, while his mother was an artist, a suffragette, and later, the artistic director of a fashion magazine called Delineator. They were the type of family who had their own coat of arms, were featured in Who’s Who, and owned a second house upstate to escape the New York summers.
One thing many people don’t know is that Humphrey Bogart achieved celebrity status way earlier than they would expect. When he was a baby, in fact. As a commercial illustrator, Maud Humphrey was often commissioned by different brands to create illustrations for their products. One day, she was tasked with drawing a cute, chubby-cheeked baby for a baby food brand called Mellin’s. And, of course, she thought what baby would be cuter than her own little Humphrey? So she made an illustration of her young son, which was used in a big national advertising campaign. It became popular enough that Maud kept on doing more baby illustrations, but Humphrey Bogart will always be “the original Maud Humphrey baby.” Or as Bogie himself put it: “There was a period in American history when you couldn’t pick up a goddamned magazine without seeing my kisser in it.”
Having two parents with successful careers did come with a drawback for young Humphrey. He and his two sisters were mostly brought up by the maids. His mom and dad were usually too busy to concern themselves with raising their kids, and when they did, it was fairly straightforward and unemotional. Bogart later reminisced about his frosty childhood and said:
“I was brought up very unsentimentally but very straightforwardly. A kiss, in our family, was an event. Our mother and father didn’t glug over my two sisters and me. They had too many things to do, and so did we. Anyway, we were mainly under the responsibility of the servants. I can’t say that I loved my mother, but I respected her.”
Bogart’s school years were uneventful. He first went to the De Lancey private school on the Upper West Side before entering the prestigious Trinity School in 1909. All that money spent on education was wasted on young Humphrey. He was a poor student who never showed interest in any subjects, sports, or after-school activities. The one exception was shooting, which he practiced regularly in the rifle range located in the school’s basement.
Despite this, his parents still had grand ambitions for him, so when Bogie graduated from Trinity, they sent him to one of the fanciest and oldest prep schools in the country – the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Their hope was that afterward, he would attend Yale University, but Humphrey rained on their little parade by displaying the same lack of enthusiasm he had shown back at Trinity and getting expelled during his senior year.
Since he had no viable prospects on the horizon (and, perhaps, to get away from his parents), Bogie decided to join the war effort and, in the summer of 1918, enlisted in the US Navy. After going through boot camp at Pelham Bay, Bogart applied for a transfer to Naval Aviation. However, even with a letter of recommendation from his former school, his poor grades and lack of a degree doomed his chances, and he was rejected. Instead, he served as a helmsman aboard the USS Leviathan. However, by the time he reached his post, the Armistice had been signed and the war was over. Bogart never saw any combat. Instead, he spent the following eight months of his life aboard transport ships, ferrying troops from Europe to America.
Oddly enough, Bogart’s biggest brush with danger during his time in the Navy happened not across the Atlantic, but in Boston. He was transporting a prisoner to the Portsmouth Naval Prison in New Hampshire when the latter asked him for a cigarette. Bogie obliged, and when he was searching his pockets for a match, the prisoner clocked him in the face with his manacles and tried to make a run for it. This tore up Humphrey’s upper lip pretty badly, and even though he got it fixed, it left him with his trademark scar. There is another common story that Bogart got his scar from flying splinters when the ship he was serving on was attacked. However, as we said, he only received his post after the war was over, so this is impossible. Most likely, this is another story invented by the studios to make their budding star appear more heroic. And, to be honest, a few other origin stories are floating out there, so we’re not entirely sure which one is true.
Humphrey Bogart received an honorable discharge on June 18, 1919, reaching the rank of petty officer 2nd class. He did well in the Navy and received good reports from his superiors, barring just one tiny incident when he received three days of solitary confinement for being absent without leave after missing the boat. He may or may not have been drunk. We cannot comment on this.
Decades later, during World War II, Bogart would again try to heed the call of duty, but the Navy rejected him due to his age. Instead, he joined the Coast Guard Temporary Reserve and patrolled the California coast in his yacht, looking for enemy activity. As evidenced by some of the characters he played in movies such as Key Largo and To Have and Have Not, Bogart was absolutely mad about sailing. It was one of his favorite things to do, and he had a 55-foot yacht called Santana.
But that’s still in the future, though. For now, Humphrey Bogart was still a young man back from the war and looking for something to do. Clearly, higher education wasn’t his true calling, so he needed to find a job.
Bogie Joins the Theater
As with many unqualified veterans after the war, Bogart struggled to find work and had to accept whatever landed in his lap. In his case, it was a job as an inspector with the Pennsylvania Tug and Lighterage Company. He had to track down lost cargo, report damage done to ships and barges, that sort of thing. He lasted about three months there. Afterward, he was a runner, then a bond salesman with a brokerage firm on Wall Street, but these were also short-lived gigs.
Believe it or not, during this time, Bogie’s most profitable endeavor was playing chess in the parks at Coney Island, taking on all comers for dimes and quarters. He loved it, and he was a prodigious player. Bogart remained a chess aficionado throughout his life, and in a later interview, he admitted he still played it almost daily, especially between film shoots. His chess highlight probably occurred in 1955, when he played an exhibition game against Grandmaster Samuel Reshevsky and achieved a draw.
Bogart’s entry into showbiz happened mostly by accident, with a couple of well-placed connections. One of his childhood friends was Bill Brady Jr., whose father was William A. Brady, a bigshot theater producer, sports promoter, and moviemaker. Many of his productions starred either his wife, Grace George, or his daughter, Alice Brady. Anyway, Brady Jr. got Bogie a job at his father’s movie company in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
This time, Bogart worked like he actually gave a damn. He didn’t want to screw up a chance at a career in an industry that, in his mind, was undemanding and paid well. As he put it: “I was born to be indolent, and this was the softest of rackets.”
Bogart quickly worked his way up from office boy to assistant company manager to production manager, making $50 a week. In 1920, Brady moved Bogart from his movie studio to his theater company as the new stage manager. He had to go on tour for six months with the play The Ruined Lady, starring Brady Sr.’s wife, Grace George. Humphrey Bogart acted on stage for the first time during this tour, although the circumstances seem to be uncertain. In one version of the story, the young male lead fell ill one night, and Bogie filled in for him. In another version, the actor got fed up with Bogart always saying that acting is easy-peasy, so one night he dared the stage manager to take his place. However it happened, Bogart described the experience as “a horrible fiasco,” but he decided to keep doing it for the money, so at least you gotta respect the man’s honesty.
Throughout the 1920s, Bogart was a theater devotee who went to every audition he could find. After a few minor roles, in 1922, he landed the role of the young lead in a play called Swifty. Although the show opened and closed in the blink of an eye, it earned young Bogart his first professional review from the New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott. It…was not complementary. Woollcott wrote of Bogart: “The young man who embodies the sprig is what is usually described as inadequate.”
Supposedly, Bogie cut out the review and carried it with him to act as motivation. He certainly didn’t give up. He kept at it and, in 1923, he acted in his first hit, playing a reporter in Meet the Wife, a production that lasted for 30 weeks on Broadway’s Klaw Theater.
During his theater years, Bogart also got married…twice. Everyone knows his famous marriage to Lauren Bacall, which happened in 1945, but there were three other wives that came before her, and they were all actresses: Helen Menken, Mary Philips, and Mayo Methot. His third marriage to Mayo Methot was especially contentious and thunderous. Their scandalous dust-ups often made the papers, where they were known as the “Battling Bogarts.”
Ultimately, Humphrey Bogart appeared in over 20 plays during his theater career that lasted almost a decade and a half. Some of the more notable ones include Hell’s Bells, Nerves, Saturday’s Children, It’s a Wise Child, and Cradle Snatchers. He was fairly successful by the end, but Bogart decided to give Hollywood a try.
Bogie Goes to Hollywood
During the first half of the 1930s, Bogart oscillated between theater and Hollywood, doing whichever one paid him the most money at that particular time. He also moved between Los Angeles and New York a couple of times, staying in the former as long as he had a contract with a studio, and then returning to the latter during Broadway season.
Humphrey Bogart’s screen debut was nothing to write home about. It was a brief appearance in a short called The Dancing Town, filmed in 1928, followed by another short called Broadway’s Like That made the next year. Both were filmed in New York and had nothing to do with Bogart’s eventual call-up to Tinseltown. Instead, he caught the eye of a talent scout for the Fox Film Corporation while acting in the play It’s a Wise Child, and was invited to attend some screen tests. Eventually, he was offered a contract worth $400, and in 1930, Bogie made his first trip to Hollywood.
There, he quickly discovered that acting in movies was very different from acting on stage. The studios were all about efficiency to increase their profits. Get it done fast and cheap. Actors didn’t have weeks of rehearsals. They didn’t perfect their roles by playing the same part night after night. They weren’t part of an ensemble cast. Bogart didn’t even meet all his co-stars, since he was only on set for the parts he was in. And what bothered him the most was the lack of an immediate response that he received from a live audience. Or as he put it: “[It’s] hard to feel emotion when right over [the actress’s] shoulder I see a big hairy-chested grip scratching himself.”
His first full-length feature was called A Devil with Women, which earned Bogie a positive review from the New York Times, which wrote: “Bogart makes his debut in talking pictures and gives an ingratiating performance. Mr. Bogart is both good-looking and intelligent.” His next film was Up the River, directed by John Ford, where he played alongside Spencer Tracy, who would go on to become not only a major star in his own right but one of Bogie’s closest friends.
Despite what seemed to be a promising start, Fox quickly lost interest in its new talent. Bogart was never the star in these early movies, but he dropped from the fourth or fifth name on the bill to the eighth, ninth, or tenth. Then, in 1931, the studio didn’t renew his contract, and Bogart returned to the stage. In 1932, he signed a new contract with Columbia Pictures, but the same thing happened again after only a few movies.
By that point, Bogart had filmed ten movies or so, yet it seemed like his Hollywood career was going nowhere fast. For a while, he dedicated himself entirely to the stage. He got a juicy role in 1934 in the Robert E. Sherwood melodrama The Petrified Forest. Bogart played the villain, a dangerous escaped criminal named Duke Mantee. Leslie Howard played the lead, and Peggy Conklin his love interest.
The Petrified Forest was a hit, and in 1936, Warner Bros. wanted to turn it into a motion picture. They signed Leslie Howard to play the lead for the movie, but they only wanted him. The studio lined up Bette Davis to play the secondary role and Edward G. Robinson as the villain. But Leslie Howard insisted that he would only do the movie if they brought in Bogart to play Duke Mantee. Warner Bros. relented and signed Bogart to star, and they should be happy they did. Everyone raved about his performance as a psychopathic gangster. It became his breakout movie role. Back when he played a love interest or a comedy character, there wasn’t much to Humphrey Bogart. But now, in a role better suited to his looks and his talents, his screen presence and charisma became obvious for everyone to see.
Here’s Looking at You, Kid
Despite everything we just said, stardom didn’t come overnight for Bogie following The Petrified Forest. But a few life-changing things did occur. For starters, he made the permanent move to California, dedicating himself entirely to his movie career. His theater days in New York were in the rearview mirror (as was his second marriage, for that matter).
Furthermore, he also signed a new seven-year contract with Warner Bros. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that, back in those days, contracts heavily favored the studios. Warner Bros decided which movies Bogart worked on. They could loan him out to other studios at a higher rate, but they pocketed the difference, not Bogie. And while Humphrey Bogart was obligated to honor the entire seven-year length of the contract, the studio had an option to renew or not renew it every six months. At the very least, Bogie’s salary increased every time it was renewed.
With his new gruff, cynical persona, Bogart worked a lot during his years at Warner. He averaged about one movie every two months between 1937 and 1940, often portraying a gangster or some other type of villain. Usually, he played second fiddle to one of the studio’s more established stars, such as James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, or George Raft. Some of the more notable films he made during this time include Angels with Dirty Faces and The Roaring Twenties. And maybe Virginia City, if for no other reason than to see Humphrey Bogart sporting a fake pencil mustache.
After a few dozen movies, it had become clear to Bogart that Warner Bros. had no intention of elevating him to A-list status. They saw him as a solid villain, not leading man material. Or, when he did get to play the lead, it was in one of the studio’s B movies, the ones with the rookie director, tiny budget, and tight shooting schedule.
For Bogart’s career to properly take off, he needed a second big break. And he got it in 1941. Warner Bros. wanted to adapt a novel by William Burnett called High Sierra. The main character was Roy Earle, a career criminal just released from jail, who gets mixed up in a heist. The problem was that Roy Earle was a bad guy, and bad guys in movies had to die at the end if you didn’t want to piss off the censors. They weren’t allowed to walk off into the sunset. Because the character died, all of Warner’s leading men passed on the role, a privilege that was reserved only for the studio’s A-listers. George Raft, James Cagney, and Paul Muni all said no, so the role went to Bogie.
High Sierra was a hit and convinced many people that Humphrey Bogart was leading man material. One of them was the movie’s screenwriter, who adapted the novel and would become the man with the biggest influence on Bogie’s career. His name was John Huston, and although he and Bogie had already worked on the same movie, the two had never met before High Sierra. They hit it off immediately and formed a long-lasting friendship. Later that same year, Huston got to direct his first movie, and he insisted on Bogart for the lead. It was another film noir adaptation, this time from a Dashiell Hammett novel titled The Maltese Falcon.
If you’ve never seen this movie, just know that it was a huge deal, and it is still hailed as one of the greatest movies of all time. More importantly, Humphrey Bogart’s role as private detective Sam Spade became iconic. It’s still the image many people have today when they think of the stereotypical American PI – cynical, tough, fast-talking, wisecracking, dressed in a suit, wearing a fedora and a trenchcoat, with a cigarette in one hand and a pistol in the other, always happy to smack Peter Lorre around.
For many other actors, it would have been the role of a lifetime. But Humphrey Bogart one-upped himself just a year later. In 1942, he starred in a romantic wartime drama opposite Ingrid Bergman. He played an American expat named Rick Blaine who owned a nightclub in Morocco during World War II. The movie was called Casablanca.
I mean, do we even have to say anything else? It’s Casablanca. Although we should point out that the initial reception to it was good, not great. Bogart’s performance was praised right off the bat, though, and it earned him his first Oscar nomination. In the decades since, however, the popularity, reputation, and influence of Casablanca have grown tremendously, and it is now hailed as a masterpiece of American cinema. It’s highly quotable, too. Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you’ve probably heard lines such as “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.” Although one of its most famous lines – “Play it again, Sam” is never actually said in the movie.
Hollywood Legend
After Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart had officially achieved A-list status and, for the rest of the decade, he constantly ranked among the top actors when it came to popularity and salary.
In 1944, Bogart filmed his next notable picture. Titled To Have and Have Not, loosely based on a novel by Ernest Hemingway, it was pretty clearly trying to replicate the same formula as Casablanca. It didn’t quite achieve that, but it became noteworthy for a different reason. It was the first on-screen pairing of Humphrey Bogart and his future fourth wife, Lauren Bacall. Despite the 25-year difference between them, the two kindled an immediate romance. They got married the following year and had two children together: Stephen and Leslie. Bogie and Bacall became Hollywood’s It couple, the Brangelina of their day. They went on to make three more movies together over the next five years: The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo.
That third one also represented a reunion with Bogie’s favorite director, John Huston, who continued to make sure that Bogart got the best parts in his movies. Huston and Bogart made three more movies together. One of them, Beat the Devil, was nothing special, but the other two became two more shining feathers in Bogie’s cap.
First, there was the contemporary Western The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in 1948. Bogart plays against type by not being the hero of the story. Instead, he suffers a slow gold-induced descent into madness until he betrays his two partners and ends up getting his head chopped off for his efforts. The decapitation scene, unfortunately, was heavily edited by the censors, who had a meltdown and needed their smelling salts when they saw the original that involved Bogie’s fake head rolling into a puddle.
The other movie was 1951’s The African Queen. Bogart, starring alongside Katherine Hepburn, once again played an atypical role for him, as the captain of a small steamboat trying to escape the Germans during World War I. Many consider it his finest acting role, and the Academy agreed, rewarding Bogart with the Oscar for Best Actor, while Huston and Hepburn both received nominations. Following his win, Bogart said this:
“The best way to survive an Oscar is to never try to win another one…You’ve seen what happens to some Oscar winners. They spend the rest of their lives turning down scripts while searching for the great role to win another one. Hell, I hope I’m never even nominated again. It’s meat-and-potato roles for me from now on.”
Despite Bogart’s words, one of those meat-and-potato roles earned him another nomination. It was 1954’s The Caine Mutiny, another widely-acclaimed hit that garnered seven Oscar nominations, in total.
A couple more notable movies followed, such as Sabrina and his final picture, The Harder They Fall, but the end came pretty fast and sudden for Humphrey Bogart. He had been a heavy drinker and a two-pack-a-day smoker for his entire adult life, so it’s not a huge shocker that he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 1956. He underwent a drastic operation where the doctors removed most of his esophagus and two lymph nodes. Afterward, he underwent radiation and cobalt treatments, but these only slightly delayed the inevitable. Humphrey Bogart lasted for another ten months following the operation, dying on January 14, 1957, aged 57.
John Huston gave the eulogy at Bogie’s funeral, and ended it with an emphatic statement: “There will never be another like him.”
