Humphrey Bogart

Bogart spent more than a decade in supporting roles, mostly playing gangsters, before his breakthrough as an escaped killer in High Sierra (1941). The Maltese Falcon the same year made him a star and set the template for noir: his Sam Spade and later Philip Marlowe became the models every detective would follow. Then came Casablanca (1942), where his Rick Blaine - ranked the fourth greatest hero in American cinema - gave him his first romantic lead opposite Ingrid Bergman in what the AFI later called the greatest love story in American film. On the set of To Have and Have Not (1944), the 44-year-old Bogart fell for his 19-year-old costar Lauren Bacall; he divorced his third wife and married her in 1945. He won his only Oscar for The African Queen (1951), playing a cantankerous skipper opposite Katharine Hepburn, and earned a third nomination for The Caine Mutiny (1954). A heavy smoker and drinker, he died of esophageal cancer in January 1957, leaving four films on the AFI's greatest-movies list and a face the culture never forgot.