Robert Sacchi, the Man Who Looked Exactly Like Humphrey Bogart

In the 1970s, hundreds of college campuses received a visit from a special guest: actor Humphrey Bogart. Dressed in a white dinner jacket familiar to fans of Casablanca, “Bogie” strutted around onstage and delivered his thoughts on contemporary politics, pop culture, and his own work in film, all of it couched in his distinctive lisp.

That a movie star of Bogart’s caliber would appear at a college was one thing. The more astounding fact was that Bogart had died decades earlier, in 1957.

The man embodying Bogart was Robert Sacchi, an actor and writer whose resemblance to the star of The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen was so astonishing it regularly drew gasps from audiences attending his one-man show, Bogey’s Back. Sacchi appeared in dozens of commercials, in films, and once even in a casino to offer his particular form of necromancy. Decades before deceased actors could be regenerated digitally, Sacchi was something of an original copy—albeit one who sometimes invited criticism for his homage.

“I’m not exploiting Bogart,” he once said of the ethical implications of his work. “I’m perpetuating a legend.”

1. Here’s Looking Like You, Kid
2. Playing Bogie Again (and Again)
3. Bogey Lives

Here’s Looking Like You, Kid

Sacchi was born March 27, 1932, in Rome, Italy, to parents Alberto and Marietta. The duo immigrated to New York City when Sacchi was still an infant and when Bogart—the man whom he would age into resembling—was still a peripheral player in Hollywood.

The remarks began in the 1940s, when Sacchi’s high school classmates at Cardinal Hayes High in the Bronx noted his uncanny likeness. It was something of a backhanded compliment: While Bogart was by this point a major star, he was also unconventionally attractive. Sacchi himself would later note the actor “looked like he had lived a hard life.” It would have been preferable, he said, to look like Gregory Peck.

The Bogart-ness of Sacchi remained with him as he wound his way through college, including earning a master’s in liberal arts at New York University. Like Bogart, he had acting aspirations and took roles in school as well as summer stock theater. He worked in the oil industry while going out on auditions in his twenties, though his looks were often an obvious hindrance to disappearing inside other parts.

But what had kept him a curiosity among casting directors soon proved to be an asset. In the late 1960s, roughly 10 years following Bogart’s death from esophageal cancer at age 57, nostalgia for the actor began to surface. Like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and other mid-century performers, Bogart’s looks and cadence took on an iconic weight. Advertising executives suddenly embraced his cultural cache to reach consumers.

In 1967, Sacchi was hired to appear in ads for London Fog raincoats, looking forlornly into the camera in an echo of Bogart’s familiar expression. The campaign was successful enough that Sacchi was then recruited to project Bogart in over 100 national and regional commercials for brands like Ford cars and Gillette razors. He even appeared in industrial workplace films, lecturing employees about office protocol.

Non-Bogart roles followed, though they were minor. A part as a trenchcoat-clad cop in the lurid thriller The French Sex Murders (1972) was largely ignored. But come the early 1970s, Sacchi was hit with another stroke of luck. Filmmaker and playwright Woody Allen wrote a stage play, Play It Again, Sam, in which the protagonist is counseled by an imaginary Bogart. Actor Jerry Lacy played Bogart in the show and in the 1972 film version; Sacchi got the role in a touring production of the play, which ran off and on for years and which he would later refer to as his “annuity.”

The show seemingly exhausted Sacchi’s opportunities as Bogart. But he had other ideas.

Playing Bogie Again (and Again)

It was not simply that Sacchi looked like Bogart. He had roughly the same build—5 feet, 10 inches (compared to Bogart’s 5 feet, 8 inches) and slender—as well as a similar voice. To portray the actor convincingly, Sacchi studied the actor’s films and picked up his mannerisms. (In a pre-VHS era, footage of Bogart was limited to late-night movies or revival theaters.) Sacchi also read biographies of the actor and gathered still photographs. What he didn’t do, apparently, was undergo any cosmetic procedures to better resemble Bogart, a charge he always categorically denied.

“Bogart’s characteristics are legendary and there are certain things his fans look for,” Sacchi said. “The way he held a cigarette, the way he touched his lips, the way he stood with his legs a bit apart. People watch Bogart every day on television and can criticize you for a million different things.”

That Sacchi’s main income came from being a faux Bogart never seemed to faze him. After all, Sacchi said, Bogart himself mimicked a real person in the 1936 crime drama The Petrified Forest: His character was inspired by infamous gangster John Dillinger. Producers picked Bogart for his resemblance to the criminal. If it was fine for Bogart to imitate Dillinger, why wasn’t it fine for Sacchi to do the same with Bogart?

Inevitably, there were questions about how Bogart’s friends and relatives felt about Sacchi’s likeness. Actress Lauren Bacall, who was married to Bogart, was unmoved, at least as far as Sacchi’s commercial work was concerned. “Every S.O.B. and his brother is trying to make a buck from Bogey,” she said in 1974. “He was a man who hated commercialization all his life. But he’s dead and he can’t fight back.”

Sacchi was not dissuaded. (“Bogart made her, and people don’t knock on her door anymore,” he said of Bacall.) On the heels of Play It Again, Sam, Sacchi decided to write a stage show of his own. In Bogey’s Back, which he debuted in 1974, Sacchi’s resurrected Bogart reviews his career as well as the issues of the ‘70s, including Watergate. He also reenacted some of Bogart’s more famous film scenes.

“I said, ‘Look, the way it’s going, being typecast as Bogart, I might as well go with Bogart all the way,’ ” he recalled in 1981. “And I got together this one-man show which I did very well with.”

The show was a hit, with Sacchi booking over 300 colleges and auditoriums through 1979. And while he may have cracked jokes in character, they were never meant to be at Bogart’s expense. “I never do anything to offend the memory of Bogart,” he said. “I play him in good taste at all times. I don’t do jokes about him. I admire him as a man and actor.”

Bogey Lives

Sacchi’s biggest break as Bogart came in 1980, when he was cast in Sam Marlowe, Private Eye, a tribute to the detective noir film genre. The movie was adapted from a book by Andrew Fenady, who also wrote the script. The story concerns a police officer who undergoes plastic surgery to look like Humphrey Bogart—though the film doesn’t explain why—and proceeds to get work as a private detective in a mystery reminiscent of The Maltese Falcon.

According to Fenady, another actor was being considered for the lead role before Sacchi walked in and halted the search. “I went into shock,” Fenedy said. “Bob doesn’t need to do an impersonation. The physical impact is enough. When he began talking, I knew I had Bogart.”

Sam Marlowe was later retitled The Man With Bogart’s Face, also the name of Fenady’s book. It received mixed reviews and largely came and went without fanfare. Critics weren’t exactly unkind to Sacchi but couldn’t help but observe what they perceived to be his limited range. The movie, wrote New York Times film critic Tom Buckley, indicated “his hopes for future employment in films would seem to be limited.”

It was seemingly the last gasp for Sacchi’s Bogart opportunities, save for two things: nostalgia for Bogart persisted, and Sacchi was extremely good at indulging in it.

In the 1980s and beyond, Sacchi continued his touring show, now titled simply Bogart, and took on odd jobs, like appearing as the actor in a music video for the Phil Collins song “I Wish It Would Rain Down” or as Bogart in an episode of Fantasy Island. A spoken-word record, “Jungle Queen,” which Sacchi performed with Bogart’s lisp, was said to have been a hit in Germany. In 1988, he appeared in an ad campaign for Claridge Casino in New Jersey and greeted visitors on the casino floor.

There were non-Bogart roles, too, notably in 1990’s Die Hard 2. But for the most part, Sacchi and Bogart were intertwined. Upon his death in 2021, virtually all of his obituaries led with one thing: his remarkable resemblance to an old Hollywood star.

In 1995, Sacchi was asked to portray the actor one final time in an episode of the HBO anthology series Tales From the Crypt. As in The Man With Bogart’s Face, the episode, “You, Murderer,” deals with a man who undergoes surgery to look like Bogart, with director Robert Zemeckis shooting it from the character’s perspective.

This time, Sacchi would lend only his voice and body. To achieve Bogart’s face, Zemeckis used existing footage of Bogart and digitally inserted it onto Sacchi’s neck. (Viewers saw Bogart’s likeness when the character looked in the mirror.) It was a fittingly weird collaboration between Sacchi and the man whom he had become so closely identified, even if that lifelong comparison could sometimes rankle him.

“I like hearing that I look like Bogart,” he once said, “but I want to hear that I’m not a bad actor, as well.”

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