Philip French's screen legends

Humphrey Bogart 1899-1957

The wild son of a well-off New York doctor, Bogart was drawn to the stage after abandoning thoughts of medicine and commerce. He served a long apprenticeship - 16 plays, 11 little remembered films - until appearing on Broadway opposite Leslie Howard in the allegorical Depression drama, The Petrified Forest (1935), as a gangster. At Howard's insistence, Bogart reprised his stage role in the screen version and was put under contract at Warner. There were a further 28 films - some good, some bad, most indifferent.

In one of them, the delightful Hollywood-on-Hollywood comedy Stand-In (1937), he co-starred with Howard. He played gangsters and villains before emerging from the shadows of Cagney and Robinson as Roy 'Mad Dog' Earle, a vulnerable, ageing mobster in High Sierra (1941). His stardom was confirmed the same year as private eye Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, the first of his six collaborations with friend and drinking companion John Huston, who directed him in his Oscar-winning role as the boozy riverboat skipper finding love and redemption in The African Queen.

Only occasionally thereafter did he play criminals, though his heroes invariably had a dark, complex side. Sentimentality was alien to his nature. His most famous character, Rick Blaine in Casablanca, was an anti-fascist activist who brushed aside accusations of patriotism and idealism. In at least three of his finest parts, he crossed the line between sanity and madness: the prospector in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the alcoholic screenwriter in In a Lonely Place, the best of his own productions, and the psychotic Commander Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.

Bogart was not always as tough off screen as on and, in 1948, though without abandoning his liberal views, he apologised to the House Un-American Activities Committee for his uncritical opposition to their investigations, claiming that political naivety had made him support the short-lived Committee for the First Amendment.

He was not conventionally handsome, though strongly individual, glowering, sardonic and saturnine. His facial expressions were subtly economical, his lisp was turned to comic advantage when he pretended to be a gay bibliophile in The Big Sleep. He was taller than Cagney and Robinson, 5ft 8in, the same height as the alluring Lauren Bacall, who made her screen debut opposite him in To Have and Have Not (1944) aged 19, became his fourth wife and matched him drink for drink, wisecrack for wisecrack, until his painful death from cancer in 1957.

Bogart on Bogart 'Democrat in politics, Episcopalian by upbringing, dissenter by disposition.'

Raymond Chandler on Bogart 'Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also, he has a sense of humour that contains that grating undertone of contempt.'

The verb 'To Bogart' was a Sixties term for unduly hanging on to a shared joint (used in Hopper's Easy Rider, explained in Forman's Making It

Essential DVDs High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, The African Queen, The Barefoot Contessa

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