Special Guest Blogger: Humphrey Bogart

My acting style was to consume enough alcohol to just about remember my own name and then see where that took me, it was a style that almost saved my life while filming African Queen.
I never really got on with much of the Hollywood set, one of the Warner Brothers, Jack, never liked me and never really wanted me in any of his films and i had slanging matches with John Wayne, James Cagney, Laurence Olivier and even Katherine Hepburn who said i was a drunkard but then it wasn't me with my backside hanging over the side of the boat every ten minutes when filming African Queen.
Like many members of the cast and crew, Hepburn came down with dysentery while filming, because she rather foolishly decided that drinking water was something she needed to do. As me and the director John Huston were two of the only members of the crew who didn't get sick, which was attributed to the fact that we drank only whiskey but if dysentery wasn't threatening the health of the crew, other things like malaria and dangerous wild animals were.
I was meant to be English in that film but i couldn’t do the accent so they made character Canadian instead, the problem was i had a bit of a lisp after while serving in the navy, i was escorting a prisoner to a naval prison in Maine when the prisoner struck me in the face with the shackles.
As well as a lisp i had most of my teeth knocked out in a car crash and wore a wig for most of my career due to my hair falling out from taking hormone shots due to a low sperm count.
Of all my movies, The African Queen is simultaneously arguably the best and the least seen, based simply on the fact that, for whatever reason, kids these days don't seem to want to watch black-and-white movies from 1951 about a man and a woman taking a boat down a river but Casablanca is my most well known film which is a bit of a shock because the script would change with each passing day so we never knew how the movie would end until we were practically shooting it, so how it become such a classic came as a great surprise to us people who'd made the damn thing.
I do owe my career to fellow actor George Raft, he turned down Maltese Falcon, High Sierra and Casablanca and all three lead roles went to me instead, cheers George.
Smoking two packs of Chesterfield cigarettes a day meant i obviously died of cancer but i never did bad for lisping, gummy slap-head.