Bogart, Humphrey

1899–1957

Actor

Humphrey Bogart is remembered as one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and he remains an icon of masculinity in American culture. After years of setbacks, false starts, and failed marriages, Bogart spent fifteen years at the height of his profession. In the 1940s he was ranked among the top money-making stars; by 1947 he was the highest paid actor in the world; and in 1948 he established his own film company. “Bogie,” as he came to be known, personified both toughness and elegance as the quintessential romantic antihero.

Bogart was born in 1899 to a noted Manhattan surgeon and his wife, who was a successful magazine illustrator. He had a minor career in New York theater in the 1920s and a few failed attempts at film acting in the 1930s before becoming one of Hollywood's most distinctive leading men in the 1940s and 1950s. He began his career playing juveniles—young, handsome romantic leads—on Broadway, but as the tolerance of American audiences for the carefree juvenile diminished with the Great Depression, Bogart found himself playing the role of the tough guy. With this shift to playing heavies and gangsters, Bogart achieved success and fame in Hollywood. His breakthrough role was playing escaped convict Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's play The Petrified Forest on Broadway in 1935, a role he reprised in the 1936 Warner Brothers film.

In the 1940s, Bogart shifted roles again, and began playing film noir antiheroes. In these roles he echoed the mood of [Page 61]post-World War II American masculinity, reflecting the disillusionment and masculine crisis of returning veterans who found themselves displaced, unemployed, alienated, and often disabled. At the same time, he embodied the personal integrity, individualism, and sentimentalism that lay behind this disillusionment. As the antihero in such films as High Sierra (1941), The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), and Key Largo (1948), Bogart achieved enormous critical success and popularity, and won a best-actor Oscar for his role in The African Queen (1951).

Despite his tough-guy persona, Bogart was dependent on the women in his life. He married four times, concluding one marriage with the embarkation on another. He married Helen Menken in 1926, Mary Philips in 1928, Mayo Methot in 1938, and Lauren Bacall in 1945. Bogart and Bacall had two children and remained happily married until Bogart's death in 1957. They were seen as one of Hollywood's most loved celebrity couples, and their relationship forms part of the Bogie myth: a tough guy whose heart could be won by a beautiful woman who was as tough as he was.

For contemporary audiences, Bogart encapsulates the antihero: tough, smooth-talking, with his collar turned up, his gun in his pocket, and a cigarette dangling from his lip. As the tough guy, Bogart did not so much mirror the reality of American masculinity as offer a model to which it could aspire. Even today, Bogart remains an ideal of American masculinity, embodying an individualism, integrity, and heroism that seem absent in today's culture. He remains a true Hollywood legend.