Humphrey Bogart Warner Bros. wanted to cast the then much better known Edward G. Robinson for the film adaptation; however Leslie Howard, who played the protagonist in both the play and the film, insisted on Bogart being given the part. His breakthrough came in 1941 when his performances in "High Sierra" and "The Maltese Falcon" made him a star. His first true romantic lead role came in 1942's "Casablanca", breaking his typecasting as a gangster. He and Lauren Bacall starred together in "To Have and Have Not" (1944). After they married, she also played his love interest in "The Big Sleep" (1946),
Humphrey Bogart period was in "Dead End" (1937), while loaned to Samuel Goldwyn, where he portrayed a gangster modeled after Baby Face Nelson. Bogart played violent roles so often that in Nevil Shute's 1939 novel "What Happened to the Corbetts" the protagonist, when asked whether he knows how to operate an automatic weapon, jokes "I've seen Humphrey Bogart with one often enough ...". He did play a variety of interesting supporting roles, such as in "Angels with Dirty Faces" (1938) (in which his character got shot by James Cagney's). Bogart was gunned down on film repeatedly by Cagney and Edward G. Robinson,