Humphrey Bogart^†

For a decade, he played what he called 'White Pants Willie' roles: lightweight drawing-room comedies, romantic juveniles, nothing that required much. The Petrified Forest changed that. When he walked onstage as escaped killer Duke Mantee in 1935, the audience reportedly gasped before he'd spoken a word. Warner Bros. kept casting him as the heavy after that, but 1941 was the real pivot: High Sierra gave his killers a moral conscience, and The Maltese Falcon made Sam Spade a defining type. Casablanca finished the job.

Most stars fade. Bogart got bigger after he died. The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge turned his films into a cult ritual in the late 1950s and '60s, and Godard opened Breathless as a tribute to him in 1960. The American Film Institute eventually named him the greatest male star in cinema history, with Casablanca ranked second on their list of greatest American films. His image, cigarette and all, became shorthand for a certain idea of cool that Hollywood hasn't produced since.

Lauren Bacall put a gold whistle in his coffin, the one from To Have and Have Not: 'You know how to whistle, don't you?' His third marriage to Mayo Methot was so violent their house was nicknamed Sluggy Hollow; she stabbed him in the shoulder during one fight. He was a serious chess hustler in the 1920s and '30s, reportedly beating 40 players in a single day. The lip scar wasn't a prop: a naval prisoner hit him with shackles while Bogart was on escort duty.

He died in the bedroom of his Holmby Hills home on January 14, 1957, and was cremated at Forest Lawn while his memorial service ran simultaneously at All Saints Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills. A glass-enclosed model of his yacht Santana stood at the pulpit in place of a casket. John Huston delivered the eulogy: 'He is quite irreplaceable. There will never be another like him.' He was posthumously inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.