- Bogart’s performances in “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Big Sleep” established him as the template for hard-boiled detectives in film noir. It was Bogart’s role in “Casablanca” that cemented his legacy as one of Hollywood’s finest actors and showcased a more sensitive side to his acting abilities.
2. Everyone associates Ingrid Bergman’s rise to international fame with “Casablanca” (pictured), but she was already a star in Sweden long before that.
3. Paul Henreid made two films that were to define his career forever, “Now Voyager” and “Casablanca.”
4. Having found limited success as a stage actor in his native England and New York, Claude Rains made a sensational film debut in “The Invisible Man” (1933).
5. One of the premiere actors of the German stage and silent screen, Conrad Veidt went on to become a prominent film star in Great Britain prior to his exodus to Hollywood during World War II, where, ironically, he was most often cast as a Nazi.
6.Greenstreet had a great theatrical career before making his film debut in The Maltese Falcon (1941)
7. Peter Lorre was already a well-established actor before being cast in Casablanca, as he starred in M, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Maltese Falcon.
8. S.K Sakall became a star of the Hungarian stage and screen in the 1910s and 1920s. At the beginning of the 1920s he moved to Vienna, where he appeared in Hermann Leopoldi‘s Kabarett Leopoldi-Wiesenthal.
9. French actress Madeleine LeBeau was best known for her small but high-impact role in Casablanca as Rick’s pushed-aside girlfriend Yvonne.
10. Working in the U.S. again during the Great Depression, Wilson starred in Conjur’ Man Dies (1936) and other plays for the Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Theatre Unit, then under the direction of John Houseman. His breakthrough role came in 1940, with his portrayal of Little Joe in the Broadway musical Cabin in the Sky.
11. She is best known for her first role in 1942 as the Bulgarian refugee Annina Brandel in Casablanca (1942).
12. Eventually reaching Broadway, John Qualen gained his big break there in 1929, when he was cast as the Swedish janitor Carl Olsen in Elmer Rice‘s play Street Scene. His movie career began when he re-created the role two years later in the film adaptation of the stage production.