Humphrey Bogart? “Yucch”
When Lauren Bacall first came to Hollywood, the 19-year-old wasn’t a fan of big-shot movie star Humphrey Bogart. Director Howard Hawks told Bacall that he wanted to use her in his next film with either Bogart or Cary Grant. Bacall, as candid as she was, admitted what her initial reaction was: “I thought, Cary Grant — terrific! Humphrey Bogart — yucch.”
Photo via John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images
As fate would have it, Hawks cast teenaged Bacall and 43-year-old Bogart in the 1943 film Passage to Marseille. “There was no clap of thunder, no lightning bolt,” she wrote in her memoir. Okay, so that was a dud. But things changed once the same director cast the two of them in To Have and Have Not.