Humphrey Bogart & Ingrid Bergman’s Casablanca Chemistry stopped as the cameras cut

Sure, they’re actors pretending to be in love, and that’s their job, so to speak, but film history is full of co-stars who justifiably fall in love. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, and Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively are examples of how that on-screen chemistry translates into real life.

Accordingly Book by Stefan Kanfer from 2010 Tough Without a Gun: Humphrey Bogart, Men In Movies, and Why It Matters Bogart experienced a lot of private drama during the making of Casablanca, including a tumultuous relationship with his then-wife Mayo Methot, which, it should be noted, he met while they were making a film together in 1938. Methot was drinking heavily at the time and accused Bogart of having an affair with Bergman, which didn’t do much to improve Bogart’s feelings about his co-star’s knowledge that her mere presence in his work life was making his personal life a living hell.

However, Bogart was no angel. Just a few years after “Casablanca” (another iconic Hollywood example of co-stars falling in love), he would cheat on Methot with Lauren Bacall. Methot later divorced Bogart in 1945 after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and because Bogart had actually toyed with her. Tragically, her depression and alcoholism would only worsen and she died in 1951 at the age of 47.

Ingrid Bergman may have had more to do with nothing happening between her and her leading man than Bogart, to be honest. She reportedly never felt attracted to Bogart off-screen after saying, “I kissed him but I never knew him.”