Humphrey Bogart

Bold autograph sentiment in pencil on album page, signed while Bogart was filming 1937’s The Great O’Malley co-starring Pat O’Brien. From the collection of another actor of the same period.

Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) was an American actor. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the greatest male star.

After trying various jobs, Bogart began acting in 1921 and became a regular in Broadway productions in the 1920s and 1930s. When the stock market crash of 1929 reduced the demand for plays, Bogart also turned to film. His first great success was as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, and this led to a period of typecasting as a gangster in B-movies. His breakthrough came in 1941, with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. The next year, his performance in Casablanca raised him to the peak of his profession and at the same time, cemented his trademark film persona, that of the hard-boiled cynic who ultimately shows his noble side. Other successes followed, including To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), and Key Largo (1948), with his wife Lauren Bacall; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); The African Queen (1951), for which he won his only Academy Award; and The Caine Mutiny (1954). During a film career of almost thirty years, he appeared in 75 feature films.

At the time of his death from cancer in 1957, Bogart was one of the most respected figures in American cinema. Since his death, his persona and film performances have been considered as having a lasting impact and have led to him being described as a cultural icon. In 1997, Entertainment Weekly magazine named him the number one movie legend of all time.

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