George Raft

George RaftGeorge Raft (September 26, 1895 – November 24, 1980) was an American film actor identified with portrayals of gangsters in crime melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s.
n 1929, Raft relocated to Hollywood and took small roles. His success came in Scarface (1932), and Raft’s convincing portrayal led to speculation that Raft was a gangster. Due to his life-long friendship with Owney Madden, Raft was a friend or acquaintance of several other crime figures, including Bugsy Siegel and Siegel’s old friend Meyer Lansky. When Gary Cooper’s romantic escapades put him on one gangster’s hit list, Raft reportedly interceded and persuaded the mobster to spare Cooper.
He was one of the three most popular gangster actors of the 1930s, with James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. Raft and Cagney worked in Each Dawn I Die (1939) as convicts in prison. He advocated for the casting of his friend Mae West in a supporting role in his first film as leading man, George Raft oldNight After Night (1932), which launched her movie career. Raft appeared the following year in Raoul Walsh’s period piece The Bowery as Steve Brodie the first man to jump off Brooklyn Bridge and survive, with Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Fay Wray and Pert Kelton.
Some of his other films include If I Had A Million (1932), in which he played a forger hiding from police, suddenly given a million dollars with no place to cash the check, Bolero (1934; a rare role as a dancer rather than a gangster), an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key (1935) (remade in 1942 with Alan Ladd in Raft’s role), Souls at Sea (1937) with Gary Cooper, two with Humphrey Bogart: Invisible Stripes (1939) and They Drive by Night (1940), each with Bogart in supporting roles, and Manpower (1941) with Edward G. Robinson and Marlene Dietrich. Although Raft received third billing in Manpower, he played the lead.
The years 1940 and 1941 proved to be Raft’s career peak. He went into professional decline over the next decade, in part due to turning down some of the famous roles in movie history, notably High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon; both roles transformed Humphrey Bogart from supporting player to a major force in Hollywood in 1941. Raft was also reported to have turned down Bogart’s role in Casablanca (1942), although according to Warner Bros. memos, this story is apocryphal.