On this day in 1945,  46-year-old Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall, his co-star in To Have and Have Not (1946). Bacall was less than half his age.

Bogart and Bacall were both born in New York. Bogart, the son of a surgeon, planned to become a doctor but was expelled from prep school for bad behavior and later joined the navy in World War I. When he returned from the war, a family friend gave Bogart a job as an office boy at a theater. Eventually, Bogart became a tour manager and stage manager for the company. He became interested in acting in the early 1920s. Despite abysmal reviews for his early stage appearances, Bogart persevered and eventually landed lead roles on Broadway.

In 1935, he co-starred with Leslie Howard in a Broadway production called The Petrified Forest. When Warner Bros. bought the film rights to the play and wanted to contract Howard for the movie, Howard insisted that Bogart also be cast. The film, released in 1936, was a hit, and Bogart began landing movie roles. For several years, he played only mediocre roles, but in 1941 he gave an impressive performance as a gangster in High Sierra, written by John Huston. When Huston made his directorial debut that same year, he cast Bogart as detective Sam Spade in the noir classic The Maltese Falcon (1941). Spade was the first of many hard-boiled roles Bogart would play, including his best-known role, that of cynical club owner Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1943).

Bacall was born in 1924 and attended high school in Manhattan. She studied drama briefly and began modeling and appearing in Broadway plays. Her film career began

in 1943, when the wife of director Howard Hawks showed a copy of Harper’s Bazaar, with Bacall on the cover, to her husband. Hawks signed Bacall immediately, and she debuted opposite Humphrey Bogart in To Have or Have Not. The movie was a success, as was the marriage. The couple went on to co-star in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948). Bogart died of cancer in 1957. Bacall remarried several years later, to actor Jason Robards, but the couple later divorced. Bacall found herself landing fewer juicy film roles as she aged, and she returned to live theater in the 1970s. She won a Tony Award for her role in Applause in 1970 and scored another triumph in Woman of the Year in 1981. In 1996, she received her first Oscar nomination, for her role as Barbra Streisand’s mother in The Mirror Has Two Faces.

(With thanks to History.com)