Humphrey Bogart Biography

As much an influential screen personality as an actor, Humphrey Bogart played the bravely cynical saloonkeeper Rick Blaine in the beloved 1942 film Casablanca. Bogart was never exactly a typical handsome movie star; he got his start playing mostly thuggish gangsters in the 1930s. By the ’40s Bogart had graduated to playing tough detectives like Dashiell Hammett‘s Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and silent, suffering romantics like Blaine in Casablanca. He won an Oscar for his offbeat role as a drunken boat pilot in The African Queen (1952, with Katharine Hepburn). For years a champion smoker and drinker, Bogart had a cancerous growth removed from his esophagus in 1956, but died a year later.