The legendary director who told Humphrey Bogart he had “the sickening face of a shit”
When two forceful personalities cross paths in an industry where ego has never been in short supply, the chances of them butting heads are always high. Humphrey Bogart was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and when he worked with one of the industry’s marquee directors, things were fractious to say the least.
As an Academy Award-winning actor who was among the most bankable leading men of his era and headlined a string of seminal films like The African Queen, Casablanca, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it’s an understatement to say that ‘Bogie’ was a pretty big deal by the mid-1950s.
His presence alone was enough to entice an audience into the theatre, part with their hard-earned cash, and watch one of the most iconic ‘Golden Age’ talents play the sort of distinguished, debonair, and charismatic character he so effortlessly mastered to earn his tag as a bona fide A-lister.
On the other side of the camera, Billy Wilder occupied a similar position. By the time he and Bogart worked together on 1954’s Sabrina, he’d won three Oscars from a dozen nominations and helmed classics like Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard. Two titans operating at the peak of their powers should have been a dream combination, but it was anything but.
Naturally, Wilder directing Bogart, Audrey Hepburn, and William Holden in a frothy romantic caper was a massive success at the box office and during awards season, with Sabrina winning a solitary Oscar from six nods. It was a star-powered affair, but Bogart constantly found himself at odds with the filmmaker.
Wilder made it perfectly clear to Bogart that the only reason he’d ended up with the part of Linus Larrabee was because his first choice, Cary Grant, had turned it down. They were both used to being top dogs on set, and in their battle for supremacy, the director unleashed a tirade on his leading man.
“I examine your ugly face, Bogie,” he told him. “I look at the valleys, the crevices, and the pits of your ugly face, and I know that somewhere under the sickening face of a shit is a real shit.” Sure, Bogart wasn’t the most conventionally handsome star by Hollywood standards, but saying that he was hiding a shit underneath the face of a shit seems especially harsh.
Refusing to take it lying down, Bogart fired back when Wilder appeared one day with a new scene he’d written alongside Ernest Lehman and Samuel Taylor during their lunch break, which took 72 takes to get right. The actor asked the auteur if he had any children, to which he responded that he had a 13-year-old girl. “Did she write this?” was his scathing rebuttal.
In fact, Bogart described the Sabrina script in general as “a crock of shit” and lost interest in the story. “I didn’t know what the end of the picture would be,” he recalled. “I got sick and tired of who got Sabrina.” Needless to say, they didn’t part as friends, and never worked together again.
