Humphrey Bogart in Shakespeare’s HENRY IV – Live

As a sort of tribute to this week’s celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee, here at OHIC we are adding a bit of Will Shakespeare to our usual offerings. The summer of 1937 saw the two major radio networks, NBC and CBS, in a dueling Shakespeare competition. NBC offered John Barrymore in “Streamlined Shakespeare” each Monday night during that long-ago summer. Directly conflicting was CBS’s impressive array of Hollywood stars stepping out of their usual screen personas to play famous Shakespearian characters in hour-long adaptation of eight of the Bard’s plays. So join us for a Monday night in late August 1937, when listeners from coast to coast could hear HENRY IV broadcast live from Hollywood, starring Walter Huston in the title role, Brian Aherne as the Prince of Wales (Prince Hal, successor to the throne), Humphrey Bogart as Harry Hotspur (one of the rebels against the King), Walter Connolly as the comical Sir John Falstaff, and Dame May Whitty as Mistress Quickly, the tavern proprietor. She was 71 at the time of this broadcast and appeared in films right up until her death at the age of 82.

Please click the arrow button below and within five seconds you will be transported to August 23, 1937, to hear a celebrated group of Golden Age film stars strut their stuff in HENRY IV. All are quite good but Bogart is clearly the actor that attracts our attention in what appears to be his one and only foray into Shakespeare:

We have not found any photos of this broadcast, but the following images show Bogie as he was in the mid and late 1930s at the time of the HENRY IV broadcast.

Although he had been making movies since 1930, Bogart’s breakthrough film did not occur until 1936 when he and Leslie Howard (pictured here with Bette Davis) repeated their stage roles in the hit film, THE PETRIFIED FOREST. Bogie later repeated his role of escaped bank robber, Duke Mantee, on television in 1955:

Bogie and Bette Davis were also co-starred on radio in the late ’30s:

During those years Bogie played the bad guy in films opposite James Cagney, and also Edward G. Robinson, pictured here in BULLETS OT BALLOTS (1936):

Years later, a sombre Bogart, with Robinson, attend funeral services for his HENRY IV co-star Walter Huston on April 11, 1950:

Another portrait of the youthful Humphrey Bogart in 1937, when his iconic roles in THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) and CASABLANCA (1942) must have seemed a long way off: