Humphrey Bogart was the tough guy with a tender heart: a man who could look out for himself in a world of gangsters and spies, and who, in the end, always showed the decency underneath the hard exterior.
Humphrey DeForest Bogart was born on December 25, 1899, in New York City, and grew up in a comfortable family before serving in the United States Navy during World War I. After the war he worked on stage, and his film career began with small roles, until The Petrified Forest (1936), in which he played escaped killer Duke Mantee, a role he had played on Broadway, made him a screen presence.
The forties made him a legend. In High Sierra (1941) he played gangster Roy Earle, in The Maltese Falcon (1941) he played private detective Sam Spade, and in Casablanca (1942) he played Rick Blaine, the cynical café owner in wartime Morocco who chooses love and sacrifice over neutrality. Casablanca became one of the most loved films ever made, and Rick’s farewell to Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman, remains a defining moment in cinema.
Bogart’s partnership with Lauren Bacall, whom he met on To Have and Have Not (1944) and married in 1945, produced films such as The Big Sleep (1946) and Key Largo (1948). In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) he played the greedy Fred C. Dobbs, and in The African Queen (1951) he played riverboat captain Charlie Allnut, a role that won him the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Bogart died on January 14, 1957, but his image endures: the man in the trench coat, with a cigarette and a code of his own, who could be tough, funny and tender in the same scene.