Humphrey Bogart Biography

Actor Humphrey Bogart became a legend for his roles in 1940s-era films like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon and To Have and Have Not.

Humphrey Bogart - Casablanca Legend (TV-14; 1:08) Watch a short video about Humphrey Bogart and learn how the acting legend got his trademark scar on his face.

Synopsis

Humphrey Bogart was born on December 25, 1899, in New York City. He began his career on Broadway in the 1920s. This led to B-movie parts in 1930s Hollywood. Bogart's turning point came in the 1940s, with his legendary roles in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. He married several times throughout his life, with his last wife being actress Lauren Bacall. He died in 1957 at the age of 57 to esophageal cancer.

Childhood

Hailed by many as the greatest male movie star of all time, Humphrey Bogart was born in New York on December 25, 1899. Bogart, whose surname comes from the Dutch for "keeper of an orchard," was born into a wealthy and prominent New York family, descended directly from New York's first Dutch colonial settlers. His father, Belmont DeForest Bogart, was a respected and socially prominent heart surgeon. His mother, Maud Humphrey, was an accomplished painter and artistic director of The Delineator, a woman's fashion magazine. One of her drawings of Humphrey Bogart as a baby was used in a national advertising campaign for Mellin's baby food and briefly turned the infant Bogart into a national sensation.

Bogart later recalled, "There was a period in American history when you couldn't pick up a goddamned magazine without seeing my kisser in it." Although she would paint young Humphrey many times throughout his childhood, Maud Bogart was by all accounts an intense, work-obsessed woman who was never especially close to or fond of her son. As Bogart himself put it, "If, when I was grown up, I [had] sent my mother one of those Mother's Day telegrams or said it with flowers, she would have returned the wire and flowers to me, collect."

The Bogarts owned a summer retreat on Canandaigua Lake, one of the most beautiful of the "finger lakes" in upstate New York, and it was there that Bogart passed his happiest days as a child. He spent his summers at Canandaigua playing chess and sailing, both lifelong hobbies that occasionally bordered on obsessions. Bogart attended the prestigious and socially elite Trinity School in New York City, where he was a disinterested and poor student.

His bad grades, his effeminate name, the overly ceremonial clothes his mother made him wear and his ineptitude for sports made Bogart the frequent butt of his classmates' jokes. One recalled, "Bogart never came out for anything. He wasn't a very good student ... He added up to nothing in our class."
Despite his poor performance in school, in 1917 Bogart's parents decided to send him to Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts—the rigorous and storied private boarding school where John Adams had once served as headmaster. Predictably, Bogart failed to meet the school's high academic standards and was expelled in May of the next year.

Advertisement — Continue reading below

Enlisted Life

Young, restless and unsure what to make of his life, Bogart enlisted in the United States Navy, only weeks after his dismissal from school, to fight in World War I. He recalled his thinking at the time: "War was great stuff. Paris! French girls! Hot damn! ... The war was a big joke. Death? What does death mean to a kid of 17?" Perhaps the most notable occurrence of Humphrey's naval service was a scar he acquired above the right corner of his upper lip that would later become the defining feature of his tough guy appearance.

Although accounts vary, the most widely accepted story is that Bogart received the scar while escorting a handcuffed prisoner. The prisoner asked him for a cigarette, and when Humphrey reached into his pocket for a match, the prisoner smashed him in the face with his handcuffs and attempted, unsuccessfully, to flee.

Bogart was honorably discharged from the navy in 1919 and once again faced the question of what to make of his life. A year later, he met a stage actress named Alice Brady who landed him a job as the company manger of a touring production of The Ruined Lady.

A year later, in 1921, he made his stage debut as a Japanese waiter in a production of a play called Drifting. Bogart's one line, uttered in his best attempt at a Japanese accent, was "Drinks for my lady and for her most honored guests." Despite his son's miniscule role, upon seeing the show for the first time Bogart's father leaned over and whispered to the person next to him, "The boy's good, isn't he?"

Hollywood Career

That little taste of life on stage was enough for Bogart to resolve to become an actor, and for more than a decade he struggled to get his acting career off the ground, landing only minor roles in shows such as Nerves and The Skyrocket. Then, in 1934, Bogart finally delivered his breakthrough performance in Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest. He portrayed Duke Mantee, an escaped killer, and so fully embodied the role of the villain—stooped posture, dangling hands, dead stare—that the audience reportedly let out a gasp of horror the first time he walked on stage.

After delivering an equally riveting performance in the film adaptation of The Petrified Forest two years later, Bogart carved out a niche as one of Hollywood's go-to actors to play criminals. His early gangster and crime films included The Great O'Malley (1937), Dead End (1937), Crime School (1938) and King of the Underworld (1939).

Bogart felt limited playing such similar roles in film after film. He managed to break free from typecasting with his portrayal of the smooth, cunning and honorable private eye Sam Spade in the 1941 film noir masterpiece The Maltese Falcon. As it turned out, the film allowed Bogart to prove his versatility as an actor just in time to be cast in the leading role in the 1942 war romance Casablanca. Bogart played Rick Blaine, an American expatriate struggling to rekindle his relationship with his Norwegian lover (Ingrid Bergman) in the midst of World War II. Casablanca won three Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director) and is now ranked among the greatest films of all time. Also one of the most quotable films of all time, Casablanca ends with the unforgettable words, spoken by Bogart, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

One of Hollywood's most popular actors in the wake of Casablanca, Bogart continued on to a long and distinguished Hollywood career that included over 80 films. His most celebrated performance after Casablanca came in the 1951 film The African Queen, in which he co-starred with Katharine Hepburn and for which he won his first and only Academy Award for Best Actor. Bogart said after receiving the award, "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." His most notable later films included The Caine Mutiny (1954), Sabrina (1954) and The Harder They Fall (1956).

Advertisement — Continue reading below

Final Years

In 1956, while still in the prime of his career, Bogart was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. Surgery failed to remove the cancerous growth, and Bogart died on January 14, 1957. He was 57 years old.
While Humphrey Bogart was already one of the top movie stars in the country at the time of his death, his acclaim has grown enormously in the decades since his passing. Called "the Bogart Boom" in reference to the title of a series of Playboy articles chronicling the phenomenon, during the 1960s Bogart's films became the objects of superlative critical praise and his personality the object of cultish adulation. Both because of and despite his cavalierly anti-Hollywood persona, Bogart remains timelessly cool in a way few celebrities have ever been able to achieve.

In 1997, Entertainment Weekly named him "the number one movie legend of all time"; in 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the greatest male movie star of all time. Bogart's friend and biographer, Nathaniel Benchley, summed up the actor's life: "[Bogart] achieved class through his integrity and his devotion to what he thought was right. He believed in being direct, simple, and honest, all on his own terms, and this ruffled some people and endeared him to others."

Personal Life

Humphrey Bogart was married four times during his life. He married his first wife, Helen Menken, in 1926. They divorced after less than a year of marriage, and in 1928 Bogart married another actress, Mary Philips. Their marriage also dissolved when Bogart made the move from New York to Hollywood, and in 1938 Bogart married his third wife, Mayo Methot.

Theirs was a tumultuous and fiery union—they were known in Hollywood as the "Battling Bogarts"—until they too divorced in 1945. Less than two weeks after his divorce from Methot, Bogart married Betty Perske, better known as Lauren Bacall, his young and extraordinarily beautiful costar in To Have and Have Not. They had two children together, a son Stephen and a daughter Leslie. Bogart and Bacall remained together until his death.

Tough Without a Gun: The Extraordinary Life of Humphrey Bogart by Stefan Kanfer – review

Humphrey Bogart with Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep (1946). Photograph: Allstar Collection Allstar Collection/Cinetext/WARN/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Born in the last days of the Victorian era into a well-established New York family, Humphrey Bogart went from riches to even greater riches as he became one of Hollywood's highest-paid actors. His father was a wealthy, Yale-educated doctor addicted to alcohol and morphine, his mother a successful magazine illustrator and heavy drinker, and they were constantly at each other's throats. Emerging from this troubled household Humphrey became a rebellious figure at his exclusive prep school and then in the navy, where he acquired the famous scar on his upper lip, possibly when struck while escorting a fellow sailor to jail but, more likely, in a brawl – certainly not, as claimed, in battle. He was later to remark that he was "Democrat in politics, Episcopalian by upbringing, dissenter by disposition".

He sampled more conventional trades before drifting into acting, appearing in a succession of wholly forgotten Broadway plays, mostly playing society types. After an abortive couple of years in Hollywood, he eventually found success on stage in 1935, cast against type as gangster Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's pretentious Depression drama, The Petrified Forest. It was the only play of significance he appeared in and is rarely revived (Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road begins with its heroine appearing in an amateur production). But the film version took him back to Hollywood for good.

As a contract performer at the mercy of studio boss Jack Warner, Bogart was put into several movies a year, most of them watchable, only a few distinguished, and after his success as Duke Mantee, usually as a hoodlum. He did, however, play a tough district attorney opposite Bette Davis in Marked Woman (1937), now most famous because Graham Greene misheard Bogart describe the Chicago crime scene as "feudal". What Bogart actually said was "futile", but Greene based his whole review in The Spectator on the parallels between US city politics and medieval barons.



Sign up to our Bookmarks newsletter

Read more

Bogart was on the third of his disastrous marriages to actresses, this time Mayo Methot, who drank as much as he did but couldn't hold it as well, when true success came in 1941. First there was the sympathetic criminal "Mad Dog" Roy Earle in High Sierra, then private eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. The following year Casablanca gave him his most celebrated role as Rick Blaine, the anti-fascist activist who brushes aside accusations of patriotism and idealism while putting duty before love. Casablanca captured the spirit of the second world war and defined the point where Bogart's public persona and off-screen personality met.

His next important film, Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not, teamed him with a newcomer, the 18-year-old Lauren Bacall. His junior by 25 years, she was his equal, capable of matching him drink for drink, cigarette for cigarette, wisecrack for wisecrack. Until his death in 1957 they were "Bogey and Betty", Hollywood's most fashionable and emulated couple, or at least until "Debbie and Eddie" (Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher) arrived to reflect the zeitgeist of the new, conformist Eisenhower era that Bogart railed against. The best film he made with Bacall was The Big Sleep, his performance as Philip Marlowe eliciting from Raymond Chandler the tribute that provides Stefan Kanfer's biography with its title. His best work was done by the time he made The African Queen in 1951, the first of his five films in colour.

Advertisement

His last days, when he struggled with cancer while never lowering his consumption of cigarettes and liquor, were an example of Hemingwayesque grace under pressure. He did, however, spend quite a few of them in the company of Sinatra's Rat Pack, a collection of narcissistic show-offs about as far as you could get from the ethos of authenticity and understatement by which he lived. Kanfer draws heavily on the definitive 700-page Bogart by AM Sperber (who spent years doing research) and Eric Lax (who pulled it together after her death). The result is readable enough, except for a certain stylistic vulgarity (eg "a dress that showed plenty of poitrine") and a distressing number of minor errors.

Where Kanfer becomes really interesting is in his final chapters on the growth of the Bogart legend in the half-century since his death, which has seen his ghost giving advice to Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam, the verb "to Bogart" becoming a 60s counter-cultural term for hanging on to a spliff, his image appearing everywhere and his films constantly revived and quoted. Most significantly, Kanfer celebrates and attempts to define the way his sense of moral probity and cool deportment has survived and become increasingly potent. "Those in search of the Bogart style will have a hard time finding it in movie theatres," he concludes. "Today it flourishes elsewhere: in the principled action of individuals uncomfortable with compromise and conformity, in classic fiction, in the theatre. And of course in old films."