Humphrey Bogart was an actor who became a preeminent motion picture "tough guy" and was a top box-office attraction during the 1940s and '50s. In his performances he created an image of a weather-beaten, individualistic adventurer with a touch of idealism hidden beneath a deadpan exterior. Offscreen he appeared to be a cynical loner, granting only minimal concessions to Hollywood conventions, and became a cult hero of the American cinema. The son of a prominent surgeon and a famous illustrator, Bogart served in the United States Navy during World War I. A wood splinter accidentally penetrated his upper lip and stiffened it, giving him a physical characteristic that was later one of his screen trademarks. He began a stage career playing juvenile roles in drawing-room comedies and made his screen debut in Broadway's Like That (1930). Achieving little success in films, he returned to New York. His portrayal of the murderer Duke Mantee in the Broadway production of The Petrified Forest (1935) and later in the film version (1936) was a turning point in his career. Throughout the late 1930s he was a popular gangster figure in crime pictures starring Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and others. In 1941 Bogart attained stardom for his portrayals of Mad Dog Roy Earle, the aging gangster in High Sierra (1941), and then as Sam Spade, the hard-boiled private detective in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Other famous characterizations followed, e.g., the expatriate cabaret proprietor Rick in Casablanca (1942); the greedy prospector Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); a gin-drinking boatman in The African Queen (1951), for which he won an Academy Award for best actor; the neurotic Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny (1954); a burnt-out journalist in The Harder They Fall (1956). Bogart formed a sensational screen partnership with Lauren Bacall, his fourth wife (whom he married in 1945), in a number of pictures: To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948).

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