Born into Manhattan affluence and privilege, Humphrey DeForest Bogart was no natural as the wiry gangster or street-wise cynic. But he saw acting as the ideal profession for a lapsed gentleman: "I was born to be indolent and this was the softest of rackets." After a year at Yale and a hitch in the Navy, Bogart spent the 1920s and '30s in flyweight stage and movie parts before appearing as psychopathic killer Duke Mantee in "The Petrified Forest" (1936). The film brought him acclaim, but he spent the rest of the decade typecast as the "heavy," being gunned-down by bigger stars like Edward G. Robinson.

The mythic "Bogie," however, bloomed later in masterworks like "High Sierra" (1941), "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), and "The Big Sleep" (1946). Tough, sardonic, a little shady, he embodied the honorable noir hero. But that hard-boiled persona found its richest, most definitive form not in film noir, but in the melodramatic "Casablanca" (1942). As Rick Blaine, a cynic who trades his heartbreak for selfless political commitment — even though it costs him the girl — Bogart caught the mood of a country that had just entered World War II. His pairing with Lauren Bacall in "To Have and Have Not" (1944) led to onscreen electricity and real-life romance: She became his fourth and final wife. His career flourished in the '50s, even as his health declined; he won his only Oscar for "The African Queen" (1951). Bogart died of throat cancer at 57 in 1957. But his legend, to quote Sam Spade in "The Maltese Falcon," remains the "stuff that dreams are made of." —Jeff Ousborne