Humphrey Bogart's Real Name: Humphrey DeForest Bogart

Quick answer: Humphrey Bogart's documented full name is Humphrey DeForest Bogart. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that he was born December 25, 1899, in New York City and died January 14, 1957, in Hollywood, California (Encyclopaedia Britannica). He was an American actor known for The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and The African Queen, for which he won the Academy Award for best actor.

Real name and early life

Britannica gives the form "In full: Humphrey DeForest Bogart." The Library of Congress name heading is n50010086. Britannica says his father was a prominent surgeon and his mother a commercial artist, and that he served in the United States Navy at the end of World War I before beginning a stage career in New York, playing juvenile roles in drawing-room comedies. By the mid-1920s he had a leading role in Cradle Snatchers (1925) and was known for a distinctive lisp. He is reported to have originated the line "Tennis, anyone?" Britannica says he often played the ascot-wearing playboy or country-club figure in that stage period, a contrast with his later screen image as a hard-bitten man of few words. Off-screen, the same account says, he cultivated the appearance of a cynical loner and became a cult hero of American cinema.

Career highlights

After two film shorts—The Dancing Town (1928) and Broadway's Like That (1930)—and a Fox contract, Britannica says his supporting roles in some 10 films between 1930 and 1934 failed to make an impact, and he returned to Broadway. His breakthrough as the killer Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest (1935), and in the 1936 Warner Bros. film of the play, brought more serious Hollywood attention. He spent the rest of the 1930s in gangster and supporting parts, including The Roaring Twenties (1939) and Dark Victory (1939). A later breakthrough was High Sierra (1941). Stardom followed with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Casablanca (1942). Britannica lists a run of major films that also includes To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), In a Lonely Place (1950), The African Queen (1951), Sabrina (1954), and The Caine Mutiny (1954), the last of which brought an Oscar nomination. He won the Academy Award for best actor in 1952 for The African Queen.

Death

Britannica records that he died January 14, 1957, in Hollywood, at age 57.

Name notes for searchers

Humphrey DeForest Bogart is the documented full name; he was known professionally as Humphrey Bogart, and often as Bogie. Searchers looking for Rick in Casablanca or Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon are usually aiming at the same person.