Humphrey Bogart

ImprimirCitar

Humphrey DeForest Bogart (New York, December 25, 1899-Los Angeles, California, January 14, 1957) was an American stage and film actor. The cynical and morally dubious style of many of his characters, his perpetual elegance, the eternal cigarette between his fingers and his condition as an unconventional leading man are some of the most remembered features of his filmography. According to the American Film Institute's list, he is considered the first major male star of the first hundred years of American cinema.

Biography

He was the eldest of the three children of a marriage formed by the surgeon Belmont DeForest Bogart (1867-1934), of Anglo-Dutch origins (the surname Bogart comes from the Dutch Bogaert) and the graphic artist Maud Humphrey (1868-1940), trained in Paris with the impressionist painter Whistler, graphic director of the fashion magazine The Delineator and militant suffragette; As an illustrator, she was very reputable and earned more than twice as much as her husband. Both parents were cold, detached and formal with Humphrey and his two sisters, although they loved them in his own way. He inherited from his father a tendency to criticize, a fondness for fishing, a lifelong love of boating and an attraction to strong-willed women.

The Bogarts lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side and owned a cabin on a 55-acre estate along Canandaigua Lake in upstate New York, where Bogart's group of friends entertained themselves in their youth by putting on plays theatrical. "Bogie" he attended good schools and the family expected him to pursue his father's medical degree at Yale University.

Humphrey's life changed when, while boarding at Philips Academy, Massachusetts, he met his friend William Brady, son of stage producer William A. Brady, who encouraged him to become a stage actor. Perhaps because of this he began to not fit in at the Academy and was expelled for somewhat obscure reasons, although all related to the detachment towards the destiny that had been outlined for him.

World War I

As the prospect of a medical career had finally faded, in the spring of 1918 he enlisted in the Navy to fight in World War I and was assigned as a sailor to the USS Leviathan. In that same year, 1918, the ship was attacked by submarines and a torpedo hit it, without being able to sink it. His military record records him as an exemplary sailor and that he spent most of his time after the armistice helping transport troops back from Europe. When he returned himself he found his father ill with him and his wealthy family nearly ruined by bad investments. His character had already taken shape after passing through the Navy and he became a liberal who did not like the claims of fakers and snobs and who sometimes challenged behavior and conventional authority; he was also polite, eloquent, punctual, modest and aloof. After his naval service, he worked as a bond salesman, and joined the Coast Guard Reserve.

Actor

Bogart resumed his friendship with Bill Brady Jr. and obtained a bureaucratic job as a manager at the World Film Corporation, a motion picture and theater company owned by his friend's father. His lisping way of speaking and his physical appearance, which did not match that of the classic heartthrob of the time, made his career as an actor difficult at first. From 1922 (when he made his first stage appearance in The Ruined Lady) until 1935 he made only small appearances on stage and in a few films and was part of at least 17 Broadway productions, with roles romantic or youthful supporting roles in parlor comedies. But in 1930 his habitual residence was already Hollywood. Among the secondary roles that Bogart played, it is worth mentioning his appearance in Three Lives of a Woman (1932), a film that had a great impact on his career and helped to bring him out of anonymity.

The actor Leslie Howard, star of The Petrified Forest, demanded that Warner Brothers cast Bogart in the role of gangster Duke Mantee, a role that Humphrey had nailed in the Broadway play of the same name, because he also looked a lot like the iconic and popular John Dillinger. Thus, in 1936, the enormous success of The Petrified Forest marked the beginning of a solid career for the actor. His consecration came in 1941 with The Last Refuge , directed by Raoul Walsh.

From then on, Bogart chained titles that are now considered classics. Under the direction of John Huston, he received a definitive accolade shooting The Maltese Falcon (1941), where he played detective Sam Spade. In 1942 he filmed Casablanca , in which he starred, along with the Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, in one of the greatest love stories of world cinematography. The film, directed by Michael Curtiz, is listed as one of the five greatest films ever made, and earned Bogart his first Oscar nomination, although he did not win it, and forged the legend of him as an actor of unusual charisma. A lover of the sea, Bogart bought the Santana, a 55-foot (17 m) sailing yacht from actor Dick Powell in 1945. At sea he found the refuge he needed: he spent about thirty weekends a year. year on the water, with a particular fondness for sailing around Santa Catalina Island (California): "An actor needs something to stabilize his personality, something to establish what he really is and not what he currently pretends to be".

In just four years (1944-48) Bogart linked four masterpieces of film noir, all of them co-starring Lauren Bacall: To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, The Dark Path and Key Largo. But the one he really stood out for was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a new work with his discoverer, director John Huston. It is a crude story of greed between three gold prospectors in Mexico that adapted a great novel by the enigmatic B. Traven. Since it lacked a love story and a happy ending, it was considered a risky project. Bogart later said of his co-star (and John Huston's father) Walter Huston: "He's probably the only actor in Hollywood I would gladly lose a scene with."

The film was shot in the height of summer for more realism and atmosphere, and was exhausting to make. Screenwriter James Agee wrote: "Bogart does a wonderful job with this character... miles ahead of the very good job you have already done". But even though John Huston won the Academy Award for Best Director and Screenplay and his father Walter won Best Supporting Actor, the film did poorly at the box office. Bogart complained bitterly: "Smart script, beautifully directed, and something different...and the audience turned its back on it."

When the persecution of suspected communist directors, writers and actors began in Hollywood by corrupt Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Un-American Activities Committee, he became a spokesman for the group of actors opposed to what was then called the Witch Hunt as allusion to the Salem persecutions of 1692, dramatized by Arthur Miller; Indeed, most of those accused by this committee suffered labor problems (the Hollywood Black List) and some even committed suicide for this reason. And though he was a member of the First Amendment Committee founded by screenwriter Philip Dunne, actress Myrna Loy, and directors John Huston and William Wyler, he wrote an article, "I'm Not a Communist," for the March issue. of 1948 in Photoplay magazine in which he sought to distance himself from the so-called Hollywood Ten to counter the negative publicity stemming from his liberal Democratic militancy.

Nor did Humphrey Bogart himself escape his typecasting as the ultimate stereotype of film noir or gangsters as early as 1941, when he summed up his career this way: "In my last 34 films I was shot in twelve, electrocuted or hanged in eight and I was a prisoner in nine."

However, his acting prowess was recognized by the American Film Academy in 1951 when he was nominated for a second time and won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in The African Queen, co-starring with Katharine Hepburn. The shoot, entirely done in the African bush, was a very tough experience for most of the crew; only Bogart and Huston did not contract dysentery, because they ate nothing but canned beans and asparagus and drank no water but whiskey; Hepburn had a bad memory of that time, constantly having to put up with the drunkenness of the director and the lead actor.

Later, he participated in other legendary films such as The Caine Mutiny (his third Oscar nomination), Sabrina (with Audrey Hepburn and William Holden), The Devil's Taunt (with Jennifer Jones and Gina Lollobrigida) and The Barefoot Contessa (with Ava Gardner). In 1955 she filmed the prison-themed comedy We Are No Angels with Peter Ustinov, which would lead to a remake in 1989 with Sean Penn and Robert De Niro.

Since the beginning of her film career, she filmed several films, with whom she would be one of her great artist friends, the mythical and legendary actress Bette Davis, who is considered the first lady of black and white cinema.

With Lauren Bacall

Nicho de Humphrey Bogart, Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Glendale, California, United States).

Bogart was married four times. His first wife was veteran stage actress Helen Menken, whom he married in 1926 and divorced just a year and a half later. In 1928, he married another actress, Mary Philips, whom he divorced in 1938. Barely five days later, he married again, this time with Mayo Methot, also an actress, a marriage that lasted seven years agitated by continuous fights, many times in public, because they both shared a fondness for drinking and she was very jealous; In the last three years of their relationship, moreover, Bogart was already seeing Lauren Bacall. Finally, he married a fourth time on May 21, 1945 with her, whom he met as a co-star in To Have and Have Not, a young star of 21 years and 25 years younger, but of strong personality, deep contralto voice and beautiful wasp waist: actress Lauren Bacall. Bogart served as a mentor to her in the trade and with her she starred in several outstanding films of her filmography, such as The Big Sleep, The Dark Path or Cayo Largo. i> Also with her he had the only two children he ever had: Stephen, in 1949, and Leslie, in 1952. For twelve years, until Bogart's death, the couple remained very close and constituted one of the most glamorous and charismatics of the world of cinema.

Death

Bogart led an insane life as a chain smoker and binge drinker as a co-founder and member of the group of hard-charging actors Lauren Bacall dubbed the Rat Pack. Perhaps for this reason he died prematurely in 1957 in Hollywood, devastated by the metastasis of esophageal cancer. At the time of his death he weighed only 80 pounds (36 kg). He was just 57 years old. Since his friend Spencer Tracy, to whom the Widow Bacall entrusted it, was too upset, John Huston was the one to deliver the eulogy:

He himself never took too seriously, unlike his work. He contemplated the somewhat striking face of the star Bogart with fun cynicism; but by the Bogart actor he felt deep respect... In each of the sources of Versailles there is a picio that keeps all the tents active; otherwise they would get too fat and die. Bogie loved doing a similar task in Hollywood sources. However, his victims rarely showed him malice and, when they did, it was not for long. Their darts were designed only to adhere to the outer layer of complacency and not to penetrate through the regions of the spirit where real wounds occur. He had received the best gift from all, the talent. The whole world recognized him, life gave him everything he dreamed of and more; we must not feel sorry for him, but for us we lost him. It's absolutely irreplaceable. There'll never be another one like him.