Humphrey Bogart is almost unique in Hollywood history in having become an idol posthumously. Perhaps the cynical world-weary character with the heart of gold was a hero ahead of his time. Certainly two of the films he made in the Forties, Casablanca and The Big Sleep, had to wait many years to achieve cult status.
For a long time Bogart saw stage acting as his true métier. It was his part as a gangster in The Petrified Forest, a play filmed in 1936, that established him in the public eye, but he was over 40 before he got a real chance to act in films. High Sierra won critical and public acclaim; The Maltese Falcon made him a star. Once considered too ugly for romantic leads, in 1943 he starred with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, one of the most romantic films of all time. In The African Queen his meeting with another cinema ‘great’, Katharine Hepburn, also proved box-office dynamite and won him an Oscar for his portrayal of a drunken layabout.
In many ways the screen character was very much the man. Cynical, hard-drinking, principled, outspoken, Bogart was the tough guy with a soft heart who joked his way out of physical confrontation. His life imitated his art when, in 1945, his famous screen partnership with Laureen Bacall, a former model less than half his age, became a real-life and equally successful one.
This book celebrates both man and actor and reminds us that, in the words of director John Huston, ‘there will never be another like him’.