Humphrey Bogart

Known more as an influential screen personality than a great actor, Humphrey Bogart played mostly thuggish gangsters in the 1930s. By the '40s Bogart had graduated to playing cynical, tough detectives like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and silent, suffering romantics like Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942, with Ingrid Bergman). He won an Oscar for his offbeat role as a drunken boat pilot in The African Queen (1952, with Katharine Hepburn). For years a champion smoker and drinker, Bogart had a cancerous growth removed from his esophagus in 1956, but died a year later.

Extra credit: Bogart was married to actress Lauren Bacall, his co-star in The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. She was 25 years his junior... Bogart played another icon of detective fiction, Philip Marlowe, in The Big Sleep... Some sources list Bogart's birthdate as 23 January 1899, believing that studio executives moved the date to Christmas Day for publicity purposes.