Humphrey Bogart's birth date of December 25th, 1899 has long been the subject of biographical speculation. It has been alleged that, to improve the actor's public perception, the Warner Brothers publicity department adjusted his date of birth. In his book on Bogart, Clifford McCarty wrote that the star had actually been born on January 23rd, but the publicity department had changed it to December 25th "to foster the view that a man born on Christmas Day couldn't really be as villainous as he appeared to be on screen", writes Karl Whitney
Curiously, though, December 25th is the more likely birthday, according to the investigations of Bogart's biographers AM Sperber and Eric Lax. They uncovered an announcement in the Ontario County Times of January 10th 1900 which read: "Born: at New York, Dec. 25, 1899, to Dr. and Mrs. Belmont DeForest Bogart, a son". Bogart's parents were very respectable upper-middle-class Manhattanites who lived on the Upper West Side in a four-storey townhouse, and who kept a holiday home in Seneca Point, an exclusive enclave on Canandaigua Lake in western New York State. Bogart's father was a doctor with a successful New York practice, and his mother was Maud Humphrey, a well-known illustrator and children's artist. It was an upbringing that seems a far cry from the tough film roles that would later make Bogart famous.
The saintly publicity that Bogart's birth date could garner for him was no doubt necessary: for years before he gained his first starring role, he seemed condemned to a career as a bit-part player, often as an underling gangster who would be gunned down halfway through a movie. Perhaps it was the ineptitude of his onscreen gunfire that was the problem, Bogart wryly surmised. "It must be a matter of marksmanship," he once joked. "Guess I'll go down to the shooting gallery and brush up."
Bogart was far down the pecking order at Warner Brothers, a problem that wasn't lessened by his initial tactic of patiently taking whatever role that came along in the hope that he could work his way up. The more frequently his characters were gunned down onscreen, the further his hopes of becoming a star receded. In late 1940, he turned 41. The films that were to make his name were still to come.
It was Bogart's pairing with John Huston, who was then a screenwriter, that established the Bogart screen persona: hard-bitten, cynical, prone to violence, never beyond breaking the law, but exhibiting signs of a long-suppressed romantic tenderness.
In 1940, Huston was keen to adapt WR Burnett's crime novel High Sierra for the screen, and he eventually succeeded, with Raoul Walsh directing. Bogart played alongside the actress Ida Lupino, who was billed above him. Bogart's role had been initially intended for George Raft, then a much bigger star, but Bogart had convinced Raft not to take the job. High Sierra was very much a step up for Bogart: now he was carrying his own movie, bringing a tougher acting style to the thriller. How different to an earlier role, in Dark Victory (1939), where he played, with a lilting Irish brogue, a horse trainer called Michael O'Leary.
In Dark Victory, Bogart shared the screen with Geraldine Fitzgerald, a young actress from Greystones, Co Wicklow. She had begun acting professionally in Dublin's Gate Theatre, before transferring, via a brief career in English cinema, to Broadway, where she starred alongside Orson Welles in his Mercury Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House.
To follow up the success of High Sierra, the studio wanted Fitzgerald to play the part of femme fatale Brigid O'Shaughnessy in Huston's directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon. Fitzgerald, who was highly assertive and independent-minded, got into one of many disagreements with Jack Warner: ultimately, she didn't want to postpone her planned trip to the East Coast in favour of a low-budget thriller made with a first-time director. Her part was given, instead, to Mary Astor.
The Maltese Falcon was a huge success, both artistically and commercially, and Huston drew memorable performances from Astor, the sinister Peter Lorre and the rotund Sydney Greenstreet. But it was Bogart's central performance as private detective Sam Spade that electrified the film. Bogart gave Spade a world-weary indifference to the violent world he inhabited, as well as a chivalrous side that ultimately came second to the cold-hearted professionalism of the private eye.
Bogart and Huston made further movies together, including The African Queen, which won Bogart his only Academy Award. Other classics were to follow with other directors, such as Casablanca and The Big Sleep, which have long been staples of the Christmas television schedules. But it was with High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon that his career turned a corner, and the Bogart persona was fixed in the public imagination: sure, he was still a bad guy at times, but how bad could he really be if he was born on Christmas Day?