Arthur Hopkins

Arthur Hopkins (October 4, 1878 – March 22, 1950) was an American Broadway theatre producer in the early twentieth century.

He was the youngest of ten children born to a Welsh couple, David and Mary Jane Hopkins.

This led to his writing a play, The Fatted Calf (1912) and to producing a show, The Poor Little Rich Girl, in 1913; it was a hit and launched his Broadway theatre career.

At the time she declared that she had retired from the stage, but in 1919 she appeared as Natasha in Night Lodging, produced by Hopkins.

His last production – The Magnificent Yankee, based on the life of the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, in 1946 – was another hit.

"[4] Bogart said that the play "marked my deliverance from the ranks of the sleek, sybaritic, stiff-shirted, swallow-tailed 'smoothies' to which I seemed condemned to life.

[6] The following year Warner Brothers bought the movie rights, but the little-known Bogart, wasn't the studio's first choice for Mantee.

Hopkins' inadvertent co-conspirator, Leslie Howard, made his participation in the film contingent on Bogart's, and Bogie became a bona fide star when the movie was a big hit in 1936.