(1899 – 1957) Actor and symbol. Forty years after his death he is still identified as one of Hollywood’s greatest male stars. Where Gary Cooper was reluctant to be involved, and Jimmy Stewart shy Bogart made Americans feel he might actually go bad—but was often redeemed. Scion of an upper middle-class family he was typecast in juvenile roles on Broadway before his breakthrough as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (play 1935, film 1936). Later, he defined an American anti-hero in The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1943), To Have and to Have Not (1944), when he married co-star an Oscar.

In these films he was often paired with Lauren Bacall, Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and The African Queen (1951), for which he received strong, interesting women.

His films and even lines have become proverbs to generations of Americans rediscovering his brooding, lonely yet gentle masculinity lovingly memorialized in Woody Allen’s Play it Again, Sam (1972).