Some actors get typecast. Humphrey Bogart got dehydrated — but he insisted it was the safer choice.
In 1951, Bogart and director John Huston hauled cast and crew to the jungles of Uganda and the Belgian Congo to shoot The African Queen, a location shoot almost unheard of in Hollywood at the time.
It was miserable: mosquitoes, soldier ants, a boat that sank overnight in the mud, and river water that made nearly everyone violently ill. Nearly everyone, that is, except Bogart and Huston, who’d decided early on to skip the water in favor of imported Scotch whiskey.
Katharine Hepburn, disgusted by their drinking, stuck loyally to the water — and came down with a brutal case of dysentery for her trouble. Bogart’s explanation, delivered with his usual dry economy: “All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whiskey. Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead.”
Confidence: Well-documented — recounted by multiple crew members and by Hepburn herself in her memoir of the production.
The film went on to win Bogart his only competitive Oscar. Whether the whiskey deserves any of the credit is, appropriately, still up for debate.
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