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 three Academy Awards. After his death, a "Bogie Cult" formed at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York, and in France, which contributed to his spike in popularity in the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1997, "Entertainment Weekly" magazine named Bogart the number one movie legend of all time. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the greatest male screen legend. Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless" (1960) was the first film to pay tribute to Bogart. Later, in Woody Allen's comic paean to Bogart, "Play It Again, Sam" (1972), Bogart's ghost comes to the